Radiation and outflow properties of super-Eddington accretion flows around various mass classes of black holes: Dependence on the accretion rates

TL;DR

This study uses radiation-hydrodynamic simulations to explore how radiation and outflow properties depend on black hole mass and accretion rate in super-Eddington flows, revealing universal behaviors and broken power-law relationships.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the dependence of luminosities on accretion rate applies across black hole masses and identifies a broken power-law in mechanical luminosity with respect to accretion rate.

Findings

Radiation and mechanical luminosities scale with accretion rate similarly for different black hole masses.

A broken power-law relationship exists between normalized mechanical luminosity and accretion rate.

Luminosity ratios at certain accretion rates match observed values in specific active galactic nuclei.

Abstract

We perform axisymmetric two-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of super-Eddington accretion flow and outflow around black holes to examine the properties of radiation and outflow as functions of the black hole mass and the accretion rate onto the black hole ($\dot M_{\rm BH}$). We find that the $\dot{m}_{\rm BH} (\equiv \dot{M}_{\rm BH}c^2 /L_{\rm Edd})$ dependence of $L_{\rm rad}/L_{\rm Edd}$ and $L_{\rm mech}/L_{\rm Edd}$ found for stellar-mass black hole can apply to the high mass cases, where $L_{\rm rad}$ is the radiation luminosity, $L_{\rm mech}$ is the mechanical luminosity, $c$ is the speed of light, and $L_{\rm Edd}$ is the Eddington luminosity. Such universalities can appear in the regime, in which electron scattering opacity dominates over absorption opacity. Further, the normalized isotropic mechanical luminosity $L_{\rm mech}^{\rm ISO}/L_{\rm Edd}$ (evaluated by normalized density and velocity at $\theta=10^\circ$) exhibits a broken power-law relationship with ${\dot m}_{\rm BH}$; $L_{\rm mech}^{\rm ISO}/ L_{\rm Edd} \propto{\dot m}_{\rm BH}^{2.7}$ (or $\propto {\dot m}_{\rm BH}^{0.7}$) below (above) ${\dot m}_{\rm BH}\sim 400$. This is because the radial velocity stays nearly constant (or even decreases) below (above) the break with increase of $\dot m_{\rm BH}$. We also find that the luminosity ratio is $L_{\rm mech}/L_{\rm rad}^{\rm ISO} \sim$ 0.05 at ${\dot m}_{\rm BH} \sim 100$, which is roughly consistent with the observations of NLS1, 1H 0323+103.