Formation of precessing jets by tilted black hole discs in 3D general relativistic MHD simulations

By M. Liska, Casper Hesp, A. Tchekhovskoy, A. Ingram, M. van der Klis, Sera Markoff University of Amsterdam, Berkeley, Northwestern. 2017

268 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gas falling into a black hole (BH) from large distances is unaware of BH spin direction, and misalignment between the accretion disc and BH spin is expected to be common. However, the physics of tilted discs (e.g. angular momentum transport and jet formation) is poorly understood. Using our new GPU-accelerated code h-amr, we performed 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of tilted thick accretion discs around rapidly spinning BHs, at the highest resolution to date. We explored the limit where disc thermal pressure dominates magnetic pressure, and showed for the first time that, for different magnetic field strengths on the BH, these flows launch magnetized relativistic jets propagating along the rotation axis of the tilted disc (rather than of the BH). If strong large-scale magnetic flux reaches the BH, it bends the inner few gravitational radii of the disc and jets into partial alignment with the BH spin. On longer time-scales, the simulated disc–jet system as a whole undergoes Lense–Thirring precession and approaches alignment, demonstrating for the first time that jets can be used as probes of disc precession. When the disc turbulence is well resolved, our isolated discs spread out, causing both the alignment and precession to slow down.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9287eee859ef2e808960492e0e8c8e69abe07b4f

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Citations in the corpus

A review of quasi-periodic oscillations from black hole X-ray binaries: Observation and theory (2019, background): “3, as well as the base of the jet [120].”
First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, background): “Here it is instead due to a large momentum injection by the BH in a random direction (e.g. Schmitt et al. 2002; Liska et al. 2018) which then propagates along a preferred direction.”