Rotating accretion flows: From infinity to the black hole

Abstract

Accretion onto a supermassive black hole of a rotating inflow is a particularly difficult problem to study because of the wide range of length scales involved. There have been broadly utilized analytic and numerical treatments of the global properties of accretion flows, but detailed numerical simulations are required to address certain critical aspects. We use the ZEUS code to run hydrodynamical simulations of rotating, axisymmetric accretion flows with Bremsstrahlung cooling, considering solutions for which the centrifugal balance radius significantly exceeds the Schwarzschild radius, with and without viscous angular momentum transport. Infalling gas is followed from well beyond the Bondi radius down to the vicinity of the black hole. We produce a continuum of solutions with respect to the single parameter , and there is a sharp transition between two general classes of solutions at an Eddington ratio of . Our high inflow solutions are very similar to the standard Shakura & Sunyaev results. But our low inflow results are to zeroth order the stationary Papaloizou & Pringle solution, which has no accretion. To next order in the small, assumed viscosity they show circulation, with disk and conical wind outflows almost balancing inflow. These solutions are characterized by hot, vertically extended disks, and net accretion proceeds at an extremely low rate, only of order α times the inflow rate. Our simulations have converged with respect to spatial resolution and temporal duration, and they do not depend strongly on our choice of boundary conditions. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..