Study of advective energy transport in the inflow and the outflow of super-Eddington accretion flows

TL;DR

This study investigates advective energy transport in super-Eddington accretion flows using a new two-dimensional model, revealing that radial advection acts as a heating mechanism and results in higher radiative efficiency than traditional slim disc models.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent two-dimensional inflow-outflow model that redefines the role of advection in super-Eddington accretion, challenging the conventional slim disc paradigm.

Findings

Radial advection acts as a heating mechanism in inflows.

Less photon advection inward leads to higher emergent flux.

Radiative efficiency exceeds predictions of the slim disc model.

Abstract

Photon trapping is believed to be an important mechanism in super-Eddington accretion, which greatly reduces the radiative efficiency as photons are swallowed by the central black hole before they can escape from the accretion flow. This effect is interpreted as the radial advection of energy in one-dimensional height-integrated models, such as the slim disc model. However, when multi-dimensional effects are considered, the conventional understanding may no longer hold. In this paper, we study the advective energy transport in super-Eddington accretion, based on a new two-dimensional inflow-outflow solution with radial self-similarity, in which the advective factor is calculated self-consistently by incorporating the calculation of radiative flux, instead of being set as an input parameter. We find that radial advection is actually a heating mechanism in the inflow due to compression, and the energy balance in the inflow is maintained by cooling via radiation and vertical ($\theta$-direction) advection, which transports entropy upwards to be radiated closer to the surface or carried away by the outflow. As a result, less photons are advected inwards and more photons are released from the surface, so that the mean advective factor is smaller and the emergent flux is larger than those predicted by the slim disc model. The radiative efficiency of super-Eddington accretion thus should be larger than that of the slim disc model, which agrees with the results of some recent numerical simulations.