Stability of relativistic jets from rotating, accreting black holes via fully three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations

By J. McKinney, R. Blandford. 2008

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rotating magnetized compact objects and their accretion discs can generate strong toroidal magnetic fields driving highly magnetized plasmas into relativistic jets. Of significant concern, however, has been that a strong toroidal field in the jet should be highly unstable to the non-axisymmetric helical kink (screw) m= 1 mode leading to rapid disruption. In addition, a recent concern has been that the jet formation process itself may be unstable due to the accretion of non-dipolar magnetic fields. We describe large-scale fully three-dimensional global general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of rapidly rotating, accreting black holes producing jets. We study both the stability of the jet as it propagates and the stability of the jet formation process during accretion of dipolar and quadrupolar fields. For our dipolar model, despite strong non-axisymmetric disc turbulence, the jet reaches Lorentz factors of Γ∼ 10 with opening half-angle θj∼ 5° at 103 gravitational radii without significant disruption or dissipation with only mild substructure dominated by the m= 1 mode. On the contrary, our quadrupolar model does not produce a steady relativistic (Γ≳ 3) jet due to mass loading of the polar regions caused by unstable polar fields. Thus, if produced, relativistic jets are roughly stable structures and may reach up to external shocks with strong magnetic fields. We discuss the astrophysical implications of the accreted magnetic geometry playing such a significant role in relativistic jet formation, and outline avenues for future work.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afd668bc2cee45f8a3b93db9ce53a7a935927fd0

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Citations in the corpus

The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets (2014, background): “…the magnetic jet launching mechanism, propagation and acceleration (e.g. Komissarov, 2001, 2004; McKinney, 2006; Komissarov, 2007; Komissarov et al., 2007; McKinney and Narayan, 2007; Tchekhovskoy et al., 2008; Komissarov et al., 2009; McKinney and Blandford, 2009; Tchekhovskoy et al., 2009, 2010).”
Neutrino-dominated accretion flows as the central engine of gamma-ray bursts (2017, background): “…(2D or 3D) MHD simulations have investigated on how a large-scale vertical magnetic field evolves with an accretion disk and which configurations may power a jet (e.g., McKinney & Gammie 2004; Beckwith et al. 2008, 2009; McKinney & Blandford 2009), yet the analytic form of f (a∗) is still unclear.”
Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets (2013, background): “GRMHD simulations of accreting black holes have found MHD jets forming spontaneously from generic initial conditions (e.g., Koide et al. 2002; McKinney & Gammie 2004; McKinney 2005; Beckwith et al. 2008; McKinney & Blandford 2009).”
BLAZARS IN THE FERMI ERA: THE OVRO 40 m TELESCOPE MONITORING PROGRAM (2010, methodology): “Full three-dimensional (non-axisymmetric) magnetohydrodynamic relativistic simulations are now being carried out that enable detailed interpretation of the observations over the whole electromagnetic spectrum(e.g. McKinney & Blandford 2009; Penna et al. 2010).”
EFFICIENCY OF MAGNETIC TO KINETIC ENERGY CONVERSION IN A MONOPOLE MAGNETOSPHERE (2009, background): “However, even if linear MHD instabilities are present, as argued by Begelman (1998), their effectiveness remains unknown since they may evolve to a saturated non-linear state that has negligible dssipation, e.g. as demonstrated recently for outflows from black holes by McKinney & Blandford (2009).”
CONSTRAINING EMISSION MODELS OF LUMINOUS BLAZAR SOURCES (2009, background): “In this context, we note that the most recent models for the jet formation indicate that AGN jets are in fact dominated by the Poynting flux (and are stable against current-driven Z-pinch instabilities) up to at least r ∼ 103Rg (see, e.g., McKinney & Blandford 2009 and references therein).”
Prograde and retrograde black holes: whose jet is more powerful? (2012, methodology): “We carried out time-dependent 3D general relativistic non-radiative MHD simulations using a high-order version of Godunov-type shock-capturing code HARM (Gammie et al. 2003; McKinney & Gammie 2004; Tchekhovskoy et al. 2007, 2009; McKinney & Blandford 2009) in modified spherical polar coordinates.”
General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetically choked accretion flows around black holes (2012, methodology): “Indeed, production of persistent relativistic jets may require steady largescale dipolar (i.e. sub-dominant higher multipoles) fields near BHs (Beckwith et al. 2008a; McKinney & Blandford 2009).”
The Event Horizon General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Code Comparison Project (2019, methodology): “For example, the fiducial runs of McKinney & Blandford (2009) use 256×128×32 cells (though with fourth-order reconstruction), and Fragile et al. (2007) used a standard effective resolution of 1283 for their tilted disks.”
Relativistic MHD simulations of core-collapse GRB jets: 3D instabilities and magnetic dissipation (2015, methodology): “On the other, hand if the magnetic jets were mostly stable it would be difficult to explain the high energy emission radiated from them (see, e.g., McKinney & Blandford 2009; Narayan et al. 2009).”
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring (2019, positive): “All GRMHD simulations are initialized with a weakly magnetized torus of plasma orbiting in the equatorial plane of the black hole (e.g., De Villiers et al. 2003; Gammie et al. 2003; McKinney & Blandford 2009; Porth et al. 2017).”
Self-regulated growth of supermassive black holes by a dual jet-heating active galactic nucleus feedback mechanism: methods, tests and implications for cosmological simulations (2011, positive): “…are supported by numerical models of the microphysics of BH accretion discs that can drive massive hydromagnetic outflows and jets (De Villiers et al. 2005; McKinney 2006; McKinney & Blandford 2009), and large amounts of heat carried by photons that could potentially ionize the surrounding gas.”
The size of the jet launching region in M87 (2011, methodology): “McKinney & Blandford (2009) carried out 3D global GRMHD simulations starting from a hydrostatic torus in whose angular momentum was aligned with the black hole spin axis for a spin value a/M = 0.92.”
A Reconnection Switch to Trigger gamma-Ray Burst Jet Dissipation (2010, methodology): “Interestingly, the natural m ∼ 1 spiral mode (McKinney & Blandford 2009) demarcates a boundary where the transition to fast reconnection occurs at the jet photosphere.”
MAGNETOROTATIONAL CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE IN THREE DIMENSIONS (2014, background): “One possible such instability is the screw-pinch kink instability that has been studied in jets from active galactic nuclei (e.g., Begelman 1998; Mignone et al. 2010; McKinney & Blandford 2009).”
BLACK HOLE SPIN AND THE RADIO LOUD/QUIET DICHOTOMY OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2009, background): “Another type of magnetic switch can be due to changes in the field geometry from dipolar to multipolar, which leads to significant mass-loading of the polar regions (McKinney & Gammie 2004; Beckwith et al. 2008; McKinney & Blandford 2009) and a factor of ∼10 weaker total BH power output.”