Radiation hydrodynamics simulations of wide-angle outflows from super-critical accretion disks around black holes

Abstract

By performing two-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics simulations with a large computational domain of 5000 times the Schwarzschild radius, we revealed that wide-angle outflow is launched via the radiation force from the super-critical accretion flows around black holes. The angular size of the outflow, where the radial velocity (vr) exceeds the escape velocity (vesc), increases with an increase of the distance from the black hole. As a result, the mass is blown away with speed of vr > vesc in all directions except for in the vicinity of the equatorial plane, θ = 0°-85°, where θ is the polar angle. The mass ejected from the outer boundary per unit time by the outflow is larger than the mass accretion rate onto the black hole, ∼ 150 LEdd/c2, where LEdd and c are the Eddington luminosity and the speed of light. The kinetic power of such wide-angle high-velocity outflow is comparable to the photon luminosity and is a few times larger than the Eddington luminosity. This corresponds to ∼ 1039-1040 erg s-1 for the stellar mass black holes. Our model is consistent with the observations of shock excited bubbles observed in some ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), supporting a hypothesis that ULXs are powered by the super-critical accretion onto stellar mass black holes.