Magnetically driven accretion disc winds: the role of gas thermodynamics and comparison to ultra-fast outflows

TL;DR

This study uses 2D MHD simulations with different thermal treatments to analyze accretion disc winds in AGNs, revealing that radiative processes are crucial for accurately modeling wind properties and their relation to observed ultrafast outflows.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive MHD simulation approach incorporating radiative cooling and heating, improving the understanding of wind structures and their connection to observed UFOs.

Findings

Isothermal and adiabatic models overestimate temperature and underestimate wind power.

Radiative cooling and heating are essential for realistic wind modeling.

UFOs are only produced within hundreds of Schwarzschild radii in the simulations.

Abstract

Winds are commonly observed in luminous active galactic nuclei (AGNs). A plausible model of those winds is magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) disc winds. In the case of disc winds from a thin accretion disc, isothermal or adiabatic assumption is usually adopted in such MHD models. In this work we perform two-dimensional MHD simulations implementing different thermal treatments (isothermal, adiabatic and radiative) to study their effects on winds from a thin accretion disc. We find that both the isothermal model and the adiabatic model overestimate the temperature, underestimate the power of disc winds, and cannot predict the local structure of the winds, compared to the results obtained by solving the energy equation with radiative cooling and heating. Based on the model with radiative cooling and heating, the ionization parameter, the column density and the velocity of the disc winds have been compared to the observed ultrafast outflows (UFOs). We find that in our simulations the UFOs can only be produced inside hundreds of Schwarzschild radius. At much larger radii, no UFOs are found. Thus, the pure MHD winds cannot interpret all the observed UFOs.