The size of the jet launching region in M87

By J. Dexter, J. McKinney, E. Agol. 2011

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The supermassive black hole candidate at the centre of M87 drives an ultra-relativistic jet visible on kiloparsec scales, and its large mass and relative proximity allow for event horizon scale imaging with very long baseline interferometry at millimetre wavelengths (mm-VLBI). Recently, relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of black hole accretion flows have proven capable of launching magnetically dominated jets. We construct time-dependent disc/jet models of the innermost portion of the M87 nucleus by performing relativistic radiative transfer calculations from one such simulation. We identify two types of models, jet-dominated or disc/jet, that can explain the spectral properties of M87, and use them to make predictions for current and future mm-VLBI observations. The Gaussian source size for the favoured sky orientation and inclination from observations of the large-scale jet is as (≃4–6 Schwarzschild radii) on current mm-VLBI telescopes, very similar to existing observations of Sgr A*. The black hole shadow, direct evidence for an event horizon, should be visible in future measurements using baselines between Hawaii and Mexico. Both models exhibit variability at millimetre wavelengths with factor of ≃2 amplitudes on year time-scales. For the low inclination of M87, the counter-jet dominates the event horizon scale millimetre wavelength emission from the jet-forming region.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97f84a8be0b985bc3145956ae2720d654d09e5e3

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Citations in the corpus

General relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of the jet in M 87 (2015, background): “8 the middle 1 The emission from an accretion disk will also produce crescentlike images whenRhigh is relatively low, see Appendix or, e.g., Mościbrodzka et al. 2009, Mościbrodzka et al. 2014, and Dexter et al. 2012.”
Imaging the Schwarzschild-radius-scale Structure of M87 with the Event Horizon Telescope Using Sparse Modeling (2017, methodology): “The image has its dominant contribution from the counter jet illuminating the last photon orbit similar to J2 of Dexter et al. (2012), but the M16 model assumes energy distributions of leptons quite different from J2.”
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring (2019, unknown): “These lower values of Ṁ can slightly change the source morphology, e.g., by decreasing the visibility of the approaching jet (e.g., Dexter et al. 2012).”
IPOLE - semi-analytic scheme for relativistic polarized radiative transport (2017, background): “…& Agol 2009; Mościbrodzka et al. 2009; Yuan et al. 2009; Dexter et al. 2010; Broderick et al. 2011a,b; Dexter & Fragile 2011; Vincent et al. 2011; Dexter et al. 2012; Dolence et al. 2012; Mościbrodzka et al. 2012; Younsi et al. 2012; Dexter & Fragile 2013; Chan et al. 2013; Mościbrodzka et…”
The Event Horizon General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Code Comparison Project (2019, background): “…one can see that between the evacuated funnel demarcated by the funnel wall (red) and the bound disk material (blue), there is a strip of outflowing material often also referred to as the jet sheath (Dexter et al. 2012; Mościbrodzka & Falcke 2013; Mościbrodzka et al. 2016a; Davelaar et al. 2018).”
A public code for general relativistic, polarised radiative transfer around spinning black holes (2016, methodology): “We can also compare the total intensity image from a relativistic MHD simulation between the previous (Dexter 2011; Dexter et al. 2012) and new versions of the grtrans code (Figure 7).”
On the charge of the Galactic centre black hole (2018, background): “It can be either a Doppler beamed accretion flow or the footpoint of the jet (Doeleman et al. 2008; Dexter et al. 2012; Eckart et al. 2017) and in these cases it is difficult to make a connection to the charge of the black hole.”
The black hole accretion code (2016, background): “rovide a backup strategy for the primitive variable recovery. Similar to [60,77], alongside the usual uid equations, BHAC can be congured to solve an advection equation for the entropy S r Su = 0; (75) where we dene S:= p=ˆ^ 1 ; (76) Porth et al. Page 20 of62 given the adiabatic index ^ . This leads”