Super-Eddington Fluxes from Thin Accretion Disks?

By M. Begelman. 2002

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Radiation pressure-dominated accretion disks are predicted to exhibit strong density inhomogeneities on scales much smaller than the disk scale height as a result of the nonlinear development of photon-bubble instability. Radiation would escape from such a "leaky" disk at a rate higher than that predicted by standard accretion disk theory. The disk scale height is then smaller than that of a similar disk without small-scale inhomogeneities, and the disk can remain geometrically thin even as the flux approaches and exceeds the Eddington limit. An idealized one-zone model for disks with radiation-driven inhomogeneities suggests that the escaping flux could exceed LEdd by a factor of up to ~10-100, depending on the mass of the central object. Such luminous disks would develop strong mass loss, but the resulting decrease in accretion rate would not necessarily prevent the luminosity from exceeding LEdd. We suggest that the observed "ultraluminous X-ray sources" are actually thin, super-Eddington accretion disks orbiting stellar-mass black holes and need not indicate the existence of a class of intermediate-mass black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9fcdb8c89d9d6e50bec2ee0c48f7dce81de2c995

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Citations in the corpus

Supercritical Accretion Flows around Black Holes: Two-dimensional, Radiation Pressure-dominated Disks with Photon Trapping (2005, background): “Begelman (2002) suggested that strong density inhomogeneities on scales much smaller than the disk scale height is formed due to the photon bubble instability in the radiation pressure-dominated accretion disks, and the disk can remain geometrically thin even as the the maximum luminosity exceeds…”
A GLOBAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL RADIATION MAGNETO-HYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATION OF SUPER-EDDINGTON ACCRETION DISKS (2014, background): “We note that an alternative model that would provide super-Eddington fluxes and high efficiencies was proposed by Begelman (2002).”
XMM–Newton observations of the brightest ultraluminous X-ray sources (2006, background): “Another possibility is that they are stellar-mass BHBs that can achieve truly super Eddington luminosities via slim (Ebisawa et al. 2003) or radiation pressure dominated (Begelman 2002) accretion discs.”
A Physical Model for the Coevolution of QSOs and Their Spheroidal Hosts (2003, background): “While mechanisms for super-Eddington accretion have been proposed (Begelman 2001, 2002), fully unperturbed free-fall is unrealistic.”
The Afterglow of Massive Black Hole Coalescence (2004, background): “These disks are clumpy and porous to the radiation produced within (Begelman 2002 and references therein).”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “ULXs likely comprise a heterogenous population (see King et al. 2001; Begelman 2002; Roberts 2007 and Gladstone et al. 2009 for a broader discussion of the nature of ULXs), of which a sizeable fraction are stellar-mass BHs accreting at super-Eddington rates.”
Compact Object Modeling with the StarTrack Population Synthesis Code (2005, background): “…that at high transfer rates, flows onto BHs may become radiatively inefficient as photons are trapped in the flow and advected into the BH (see, e.g., Abramowicz et al. 1988), or that substantially super-Eddington accretion may be possible in nonspherical accretion flows (e.g., Begelman 2002).”
A Porosity-Length Formalism for Photon-Tiring-limited Mass Loss from Stars above the Eddington Limit (2004, background): “If magnetic fields are introduced, even more instabilities can play a role (Arons 1992; Gammie 1998; Begelman 2002; Blaes & Socrates 2003).”
The distances to Galactic low-mass X-ray binaries: consequences for black hole luminosities and kicks (2004, background): “However, some of these X–ray sources in other Galaxies have luminosities in excess of the Eddington limits of both neutron star and ten solar mass black hole (BH) LMXBs (cf. Fabbiano 1989).”
On the formation and evolution of black hole binaries (2002, background): “…Xray luminosity’ as the accretion luminosity from the black hole assuming that all the matter that is transferred from the secondary is accreted by the black hole radiating at the appropriate efficiency η (equation 6), i.e. assuming that accretion is not Eddington-limited (see e.g. Begelman 2002).”
Two‐dimensional adiabatic flows on to a black hole – I. Fluid accretion (2003, background): “[Note that this constraint does not require quasars to satisfy the Eddington limit (Begelman 2002).]”
Intermediate - mass black holes (2003, background): “Begelman (2002) has pursued this line of thought and has conceived of a potentially stable arrangement of matter in which radiation effects cause accreting matter to clump.”
Populations of X-Ray Sources in Galaxies (2006, background): “Both relativistic (Koerding, Falke & Markoff 2002) and nonrelativistic beaming (King et al. 2001), and super-Eddington accretion disks (Begelman 2002; both spectra and observed variability patterns can be explained, M. Belgelman, private communication) have been suggested as a way to explain the…”
Massive Black Hole Binary Evolution (2004, background): “disk is endowed with shear viscosity and has vertical height-to-radius ratio of 0.1. An ellipsoidal nonlinear response of the disk is also evident. a long-standing and actively pursued problem (e.g., [17, 205] and references therein). 9 Spin Evolution during Mergers Coalescence of a binary black hol”
Radio-loud Narrow-Line Type 1 Quasars (2006, background): “, but also to instabilities in the structure of the disks, for instance the photon bubble instability as discussed by Begelman (2002), and in all likelihood to combinations of such geometrical and physical effects (e.g., Okuda et al. 2005).”
Hyper-Eddington accretion flows on to massive black holes (2015, background): “…outflows and jets from the inner accretion disk in the vertical direction could potentially break the hyper-Eddington accretion solution (e.g. Begelman 2002; Ohsuga et al. 2005, 2009; Dotan & Shaviv 2011; Li, Ostriker & Sunyaev 2013; Jiang, Stone & Davis 2014; McKinney et al. 2014; Sa̧dowski…”
The Ultraluminous State (2009, background): “…of ULXs are single stellar remnant black holes that accrete material from a close companion star, probably at super-Eddington rates and/or with their X-ray emission subject to some degree of geometric beaming (e.g. King et al. 2001, Begelman 2002; see also Roberts 2007 and references therein).”
Ultraluminous X-ray sources in the Chandra and XMM-Newton era (2011, background): “It was suggested that radiation pressure-dominated ccretion disks have strong density inhomogeneities due to the development of photon-bubble instabilities (Begelman 2002).”