Magnetically Arrested Circumbinary Accretion Flows
Abstract
Binary systems with comparable masses and a surrounding accretion disk can accrete gas through spiral accretion streams penetrating the central cavity formed by tidal interactions. Using three-dimensional Newtonian magnetohydrodynamics simulations, we investigate the possibility of a magnetically arrested accretion flow through the cavity. Rather than solely continuously feeding the binary through spiral accretion streams, the accretion is regulated by the strong magnetic field inside the cavity. Transport of mass and angular momentum onto the binary then proceeds largely periodically in magnetic flux eruption episodes. The ejected flux tubes carry angular momentum outward and away from the binary, inject hot plasma into the disk, and can launch flares. This likely intermittent scenario could have potential implications for the emission signatures of supermassive black hole binaries and shed light onto the role magnetic fields play in the binary's orbital evolution.
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful for insightful discussions with Xue-Ning Bai, Manuela Campanelli, Luciano Combi, Alexander Dittmann, Philip F. Hopkins, Julian H. Krolik, Douglas N. C. Lin, Scott C. Noble, E. Sterl Phinney, Bart Ripperda, James M. Stone, Alexander Tchekhovskoy, and Zhaohuan Zhu. The simulations were performed on DOE OLCF Summit under allocation AST198. Additional simulations were done on DOE NERSC supercomputer Perlmutter under grant m4575. H.Y.W. is thankful for the support from B. Thomas Soifer Chair's Graduate Fellowship. Part of this project was completed during the second LISA Sprint meeting at Caltech. The meeting was supported by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Astronomy and Physics Directorate. This research was supported in part by grant NSF PHY-2309135 to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). This work was performed in part at Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-2210452.
Software References
AthenaK (J. M. Stone et al. 2020), Kokkos (C. Trott et al. 2021), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), scipy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020).
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Additional details
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309135
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2210452
- Accepted
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2024-09-03Accepted
- Available
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2024-09-17Published online
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Astronomy Department, TAPIR
- Publication Status
- Published