Confronting the jet model of Sgr A∗ with the Faraday rotation measure observations

Abstract

Sgr A∗ is probably the supermassive black hole being investigated most extensively due to its proximity to Earth. Several theoretical models for its steady state emission have been proposed in the past two decades. Both the radiative-inefficient accretion flow and the jet model have been shown to well explain the observed spectral energy distribution. The Faraday rotation measure (RM) has been unambiguously measured at the submillimeter wavelength, but it has only been tested against the accretion flow model. Here we first calculate the RM based on the jet model and find that the predicted value is two orders of magnitude lower than the measured value. We then include an additional contribution from the accretion flow in front of the jet and show that the measured RM may be reconciled with the model under some tight constraints. The main constraint is that the inclination angle should be greater than ∼73°. However, this requirement is not consistent with an existing observational estimate of the inclination angle.