Search results for "Particles"
showing 10 items of 8085 documents
A Connection Between Apparent VLBA Jet Speeds and Initial Active Galactic Nucleus Detections Made by the Fermi Gamma-ray Observatory
2009
In its first three months of operations, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Observatory has detected approximately one quarter of the radio-flux-limited MOJAVE sample of bright flat-spectrum active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at energies above 100 MeV. We have investigated the apparent parsec-scale jet speeds of 26 MOJAVE AGNs measured by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) that are in the LAT bright AGN sample (LBAS). We find that the gamma-ray bright quasars have faster jets on average than the non-LBAS quasars, with a median of 15 c, and values ranging up to 34 c. The LBAS AGNs in which the LAT has detected significant gamma-ray flux variability generally have faster jets than the nonvariable ones. These fi…
Magnetised Polish doughnuts revisited
2017
We discuss a procedure to build new sequences of magnetised, equilibrium tori around Kerr black holes which combines two approaches previously considered in the literature. For simplicity we assume that the test-fluid approximation holds, and hence we neglect the self-gravity of the fluid. The models are built assuming a particular form of the angular momentum distribution from which the location and morphology of equipotential surfaces can be computed. This ansatz includes, in particular, the constant angular momentum case originally employed in the construction of thick tori - or Polish doughnuts - and it has already been used to build equilibrium sequences of purely hydrodynamical models…
Non-linear evolutions of magnetized thick discs around black holes: dependence on the initial data
2020
We build equilibrium solutions of magnetised thick discs around a highly spinning Kerr black hole and evolve these initial data up to a final time of about 100 orbital periods. The numerical simulations reported in this paper solve the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics equations using the BHAC code and are performed in axisymmetry. Our study assumes non-self-gravitating, polytropic, constant angular momentum discs endowed with a purely toroidal magnetic field. In order to build the initial data we consider three approaches, two of which incorporate the magnetic field in a self-consistent way and a third approach in which the magnetic field is included as a perturbation on to an othe…
Dark gamma-ray bursts
2016
Many theories of dark matter (DM) predict that DM particles can be captured by stars via scattering on ordinary matter. They subsequently condense into a DM core close to the center of the star and eventually annihilate. In this work, we trace DM capture and annihilation rates throughout the life of a massive star and show that this evolution culminates in an intense annihilation burst coincident with the death of the star in a core collapse supernova. The reason is that, along with the stellar interior, also its DM core heats up and contracts, so that the DM density increases rapidly during the final stages of stellar evolution. We argue that, counterintuitively, the annihilation burst is …
Jet launching from binary black hole-neutron star mergers: Dependence on black hole spin, binary mass ratio and magnetic field orientation
2018
Black hole-neutron star (BHNS) mergers are one of the most promising targets for multimessenger astronomy. Using general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of BHNS undergoing merger we showed that a magnetically--driven jet can be launched by the remnant if the NS is endowed with a dipole B field extending from the interior into the exterior as in a radio pulsar. These self-consistent studies considered a BHNS system with mass ratio $q=3:1$, BH spin $a/M_{BH}=0.75$ aligned with the total orbital angular momentum (OAM), and a NS that is irrotational, threaded by an aligned B field, and modeled by an $\Gamma$--law equation of state with $\Gamma=2$. Here, as a crucial step in establi…
Pulsar spin-down luminosity: Simulations in general relativity
2014
Adopting our new method for matching general relativistic, ideal magnetohydrodynamics to its force-free limit, we perform the first systematic simulations of force-free pulsar magnetospheres in general relativity. We endow the neutron star with a general relativistic dipole magnetic field, model the interior with ideal magnetohydrodynamics, and adopt force-free electrodynamics in the exterior. Comparing the spin-down luminosity to its corresponding Minkowski value, we find that general relativistic effects give rise to a modest enhancement: the maximum enhancement for $n=1$ polytropes is $\sim 23\%$. Evolving a rapidly rotating $n=0.5$ polytrope we find an even greater enhancement of $\sim …
Triggering mixing and deceleration in FRI jets: a solution
2020
Since Fanaroff & Riley (1974) reported the morphological and brightness dichotomy of radiogalaxies, and it became clear that the symmetric emission from jets and counter-jets in the centre-brightened, less powerful, FRI sources could be caused by jet deceleration, many works have addressed different mechanisms that could cause this difference. Recent observational results seem to indicate that the deceleration must be caused by the development of small-scale instabilities that force mixing at the jet boundary. According to these results, the mixing layer expands and propagates down to the jet axis along several kiloparsecs, until it covers the whole jet cross-section. Several candidate …
XMM-Newton Large Program on SN1006 - I: Methods and Initial Results of Spatially-Resolved Spectroscopy
2015
Based on our newly developed methods and the XMM-Newton large program of SN1006, we extract and analyze the spectra from 3596 tessellated regions of this SNR each with 0.3-8 keV counts $>10^4$. For the first time, we map out multiple physical parameters, such as the temperature ($kT$), electron density ($n_e$), ionization parameter ($n_et$), ionization age ($t_{ion}$), metal abundances, as well as the radio-to-X-ray slope ($\alpha$) and cutoff frequency ($\nu_{cutoff}$) of the synchrotron emission. We construct probability distribution functions of $kT$ and $n_et$, and model them with several Gaussians, in order to characterize the average thermal and ionization states of such an extended s…
Numerical-relativity simulations of long-lived remnants of binary neutron star mergers
2019
We analyze the properties of the gravitational wave signal emitted after the merger of a binary neutron star system when the remnant survives for more than a 80 ms (and up to 140ms). We employ four different piecewise polytropic equations of state supplemented by an ideal fluid thermal component. We find that the post-merger phase can be subdivided into three phases: an early post-merger phase (where the quadrupole mode and a few subdominant features are active), the intermediate post-merger phase (where only the quadrupole mode is active) and the late post-merger phase (where convective instabilities trigger inertial modes). The inertial modes have frequencies somewhat smaller than the qua…
Absorption by black hole remnants in metric-affine gravity
2019
Using numerical methods, we investigate the absorption properties of a family of nonsingular solutions {which arise in different metric-affine theories, such as quadratic and Born-Infeld gravity.} These solutions continuously interpolate between Schwarzschild black holes and naked solitons with wormhole topology. The resulting spectrum is characterized by a series of quasibound states excitations, associated with the existence of a stable photonsphere.