Variation of the gas and radiation content in the sub-Keplerian accretion disk around black holes and its impact to the solutions

TL;DR

This paper studies how gas and radiation pressures vary in black hole accretion disks and demonstrates that assuming constant ratios can lead to inaccurate solutions, emphasizing the importance of modeling these variations.

Contribution

It introduces a model accounting for variable gas and radiation pressure ratios in accretion disks, revealing their significant impact on flow solutions near black holes.

Findings

Gas pressure ratio (beta) can vary up to 300% during infall.

Polytropic index (gamma) can change by approximately 20%.

Variable beta and gamma significantly affect disk solution accuracy.

Abstract

We investigate the variation of the gas and the radiation pressure in accretion disks during the infall of matter to the black hole and its effect to the flow. While the flow far away from the black hole might be non-relativistic, in the vicinity of the black hole it is expected to be relativistic behaving more like radiation. Therefore, the ratio of gas pressure to total pressure (beta) and the underlying polytropic index (gamma) should not be constant throughout the flow. We obtain that accretion flows exhibit significant variation of beta and then gamma, which affects solutions described in the standard literature based on constant beta. Certain solutions for a particular set of initial parameters with a constant beta do not exist when the variation of beta is incorporated appropriately. We model the viscous sub-Keplerian accretion disk with a nonzero component of advection and pressure gradient around black holes by preserving the conservations of mass, momentum, energy, supplemented by the evolution of beta. By solving the set of five coupled differential equations, we obtain the thermo-hydrodynamical properties of the flow. We show that during infall, beta of the flow could vary upto ~300%, while gamma upto ~20%. This might have a significant impact to the disk solutions in explaining observed data, e.g. super-luminal jets from disks, luminosity, and then extracting fundamental properties from them. Hence any conclusion based on constant gamma and beta should be taken with caution and corrected.