Correlation between Flux and Spectral Index during Flares in Sagittarius A*

Abstract

Flares in Sagittarius A* are produced by hot plasmas within a few Schwarzschild radii of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center. The recent detection of a correlation between the spectral index and flux during a near infrared (NIR) flare provides a means to conduct detailed investigations of the plasma heating and radiation processes. We study the evolution of the electron distribution function under the influence of a turbulent magnetic field in a hot collisionless plasma. The magnetic field, presumably generated through instabilities in the accretion flow, can both heat the plasma via resonant wave-particle coupling and cool the electrons via radiation. The electron distribution can generally be approximated as relativistic Maxwellian. To account for the observed correlation, we find that the magnetic field needs to be anti-correlated with the electron ''temperature''. NIR and X-ray light curves are produced for a cooling and a heating phase. The model predicts simultaneous flare activity in the NIR and X-ray bands, which can be compared with observations. These results can be applied to MHD simulations to study the radiative characteristics of collisionless plasmas, especially accretion flows in low-luminosity AGNs.

26 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• An X-ray, IR, and Submillimeter Flare of Sagittarius A*
• Simultaneous Chandra, CSO and VLA Observations of Sgr A*: The Nature of Flaring Activity
• Simultaneous Multi-Wavelength Observations of Sgr A* during 2007 April 1-11
• MHD Simulations of Accretion onto Sgr A*: Quiescent Fluctuations, Outbursts, and Quasi-Periodicity
• Modeling mm- to X-ray flare emission from SgrA*
• Cascade and Damping of Alfvén-Cyclotron Fluctuations: Application to Solar Wind Turbulence Spectrum
• The Nature of Linearly Polarized Millimeter and Sub-millimeter Emission in Sagittarius A*