Collaborative Research: WoU-MMA: Multi-scale and multi-messenger modeling of jets in active galactic nuclei

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

The overarching goal of this proposal is to understand the nonlinear connection and feedback between the large-scale feeding of a supermassive black hole, the relativistic outflows it produces, their the multimessenger emission, and their feedback loop on black hole’s gas supply. Specifically, the questions we aim to answer are: (i) How does a supermassive black hole capture gas into its sphere of influence? (ii) How much of this gas makes it to the black hole? (iii) How does this lead to the launching of relativistic jets? (iv) How do the jets give rise to neutrinos and high-energy photons? (v) Do the jets modify the black hole feeding conditions and how? Understanding how the large-scale flows at black hole feeding scales, the Bondi radius rB, affect the conditions near the black hole hole, on the scale of the gravitational radius, rg = GMBH=c2 � 10􀀀6rB, is a challenging enterprise because of the enormous range of length and time scale involved. Indeed, the orbital time scale at the Bondi radius exceeds that at the black hole by a factor of 109 (1 billion). This enormous scale separation is the primary reason why no first-principles models of black hole feedback currently exist. Here, we propose to bridge the gap and address this long-standing problem, for the first time. We propose to achieve this using a multi-scale approach that combines numerical simulations that span a wide range of physics processes and length scales. In Sec. 2.1, we focus on the fluid-based description of the gas flow around the black hole. We discuss how these flows couple to the dissipative plasma microphysics processes responsible for the acceleration of relativistic particles in the jets in Sec. 2.2 and how these particles give rise to high-energy and neutrino emission in Sec. 2.3.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date9/1/198/31/22

Funding

  • National Science Foundation (AST-1911080)

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