6 pages, 2 figures, to appear in The Galactic Center: A Window on the Nuclear Environment of Disk Galaxies, ASP Conference Series, eds: M. Morris, D. Q. Wang and F. Yuan
Sgr A* exhibits flaring in the infrared several times each day, occasionally accompanied by flaring in X-rays. The infrared flares are believed to arise through synchrotron emission from a transient population of accelerated electrons. The X-ray flaring has been interpreted as self-synchrotron-compton, inverse compton, or synchrotron emission associated with the transient electrons. Here I consider the upscattering of infrared flare photons by relativistic thermal electrons in the accretion flow around Sgr A*. Typical profiles of electron density and temperature in the accretion flow are adopted and the X-ray light curves produced by upscattering of infrared flare photons by the accretion flow are computed. Peak X-ray luminosities between 1e33 and 1e34 erg/s are attained for a 10 mJy near-infrared flare, compatible with observed coincident infrared/X-ray flares from Sgr A*. Even if this process is not responsible for the observed flares it still presents a serious constraint on accretion flow models, which must avoid over-producing X-rays and also predicting observable time lags between flaring in infrared and in X-rays. Future high-resolution infrared instrumentation will be able to place the location of the infrared flare and in coordination with the X-ray would severely constrain the disc geometry and the radial profiles of electron density and temperature in the accretion flow.
A compact gas cloud G2 is predicted to reach the pericenter of its orbit around the super massive black hole (SMBH) of our galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). This event will give us a rare opportunity to observe the interaction between SMBH and gas around it. We report the result of the fully three-dimensional simulation of the evolution of G2 during the first pericenter passage. The strong tidal force by the SMBH stretches the cloud along its orbit, and compresses it strongly in the vertical direction, resulting in the heating up and flaring up of the cloud. The bolometric luminosity will reach…
Reflection of X-ray emission on molecular clouds in the inner $\sim$ 100 pc of our Galaxy reveals that, despite being extremely quiet at the moment, our supermassive black hole Sgr A* should have experienced bright flares of X-ray emission in the recent past. Thanks to the improving characterisation of the reflection signal, we are able to infer parameters of the most recent flare(s) (age, duration and luminosity) and relative line-of-sight disposition of the brightest individual molecular complexes. We show that combining these data with measurements of polarisation in the reflected X-ray con…
An unusual object, G2, had its pericenter passage around Sgr A*, the $4\times10^6$ M$_\odot$ supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, in Summer 2014. Several research teams have reported evidence that following G2's pericenter encounter the rate of Sgr A*'s bright X-ray flares increased significantly. Our analysis carefully treats varying flux contamination from a nearby magnetic neutron star and is free from complications induced by using data from multiple X-ray observatories with different spatial resolutions. We test the scenario of an increased bright X-ray flaring rate using a mas…
We report the results of multi-epoch observations of Sgr A* with VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry (VERA) at 43 GHz, carried out from 2004 to 2008. We detected a time variation of flux at 11 % level and intrinsic size at 19 %. In addition, comparisons with previous Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) results shows that Sgr A* underwent the flaring event at least longer than 10 days in May 2007. The intrinsic size of Sgr A* remained unchanged within 1 $σ$ level from the size before/after the flaring event, indicating that the brightness temperature of Sgr A* was increased. The flaring event occu…
Over the last decade, X-ray observations of Sgr A* have revealed a black hole in a deep sleep, punctuated roughly once per day by brief flares. The extreme X-ray faintness of this supermassive black hole has been a long-standing puzzle in black hole accretion. To study the accretion processes in the Galactic Center, Chandra (in concert with numerous ground- and space-based observatories) undertook a 3 Ms campaign on Sgr A* in 2012. With its excellent observing cadence, sensitivity, and spectral resolution, this Chandra X-ray Visionary Project (XVP) provides an unprecedented opportunity to stud…
In a recent paper (Leibowitz 2017) I have shown that the 39 large X-ray flares of Sgr A* that were recorded by Chandra observatory in the year 2012, are concentrated preferably around tick marks of an equi-distance grid on the time axis. The period of this grid as found in L1 is 0.1033 days. In this work I show that the effect can be found among all the large X-ray flares recoded by Chandra and XMM-Newton along 15 years. The midpoints of all the 71 large flares recorded between the years 2000 and 2014 are also tightly grouped around tick marks of a grid with this period, or more likely, 0.1032…
The frequent flaring events in the X-ray and the NIR radiation of Sgr A* seem not to be periodic in time. However, statistical regularities, here termed "modulations by a pacemaker", are found in the recorded arrival times of both types of events. The characteristic time of the X-ray pacemaker is 149 min and that of the NIR pacemaker is 40 min. Their reality as derived from observed data can be accepted at larger than 4.6σ and 3.8σ levels of statistical confidence, respectively. These results can be interpreted as evidence for a star that revolves around the BH of Sgr A* in a slightly elliptic…
In 2019, Sgr A* - the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center - underwent unprecedented flaring activity in the near infrared (NIR), brightening by up to a factor of 100 compared to quiescent values. Here we report ALMA observations of Sgr A*'s continuum variability at 1.3 mm (230 GHz) - a tracer of the accretion rate - conducted one month after the brightest detected NIR flare and in the middle of the flaring activity of 2019. We develop an innovative light curve extraction technique which (together with ALMA's excellent sensitivity) allows us to obtain the light curves which are simul…
The Galaxy's supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, produces an outburst of infrared radiation about once every 6 hours, sometimes accompanied by an even more energetic flurry of X-rays. The NIR photons are produced by nonthermal synchrotron processes, but we still don't completely understand where or why these flares originate, nor exactly how the X-rays are emitted. The power-law electrons radiating the infrared light may be partially cooled, so the distribution may be a broken power law with a ("cooling break") transition frequency. In addition, the emission region appears to be rather compact, p…
In 2019, the Galactic center black hole Sgr A* produced an unusually high number of bright near-infrared flares, including the brightest-ever detected flare (Do et al 2019, Gravity Collaboration 2020). We propose that this activity was triggered by the near simultaneous infall of material shed by G1 and G2 objects due to their interaction with the background accretion flow. We discuss mechanisms by which S-stars and G-objects shed material, and estimate both the quantity of material and the infall time to reach the black hole.
The flaring drill in the Galactic centre. Did the IRS 13 cluster carve out the mini-cavity in the mini-spiral?
Charles University（查理大学）；Helmholtz-Institut für Strahlen- und Kernphysik, University of Bonn（波恩大学亥姆霍兹辐射与核物理研究所）；Universität zu Köln（科隆大学）；University of California（加州大学）
Sagittarius A* exhibits regular variability in its multiwavelength emission, including daily X-ray flares and roughly continuous near-infrared (NIR) flickering. The origin of this variability is still ambiguous since both inverse Compton and synchrotron emission are possible radiative mechanisms. The underlying particle distributions are also not well constrained, particularly the non-thermal contribution. In this work, we employ the GPU-accelerated general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) code H-AMR perform a study of flare flux distributions, including the effect of particle acceler…
Flares in X-ray and near infrared are observed above the quiescent emission of the supermassive black hole (SBH) in the Galactic Centre (GC) at a rate of approximately once per day. One proposed energy source for these flares is the tidal disruption of planetesimals with radius $\gtrsim 10$ km passing within $\sim$ 1 AU of the SBH. Very little is known about the formation and evolution of planetesimals in galactic nuclei such as the GC, making predictions for flaring event rates uncertain. We explore two scenarios for the formation of planetesimals in the GC: (1) in a large-scale cloud bound t…
We report the detection and analysis of a radio flare observed on 17 April 2014 from Sgr A* at $9$ GHz using the VLA in its A-array configuration. This is the first reported simultaneous radio observation of Sgr A* across $16$ frequency windows between $8$ and $10$ GHz. We cross correlate the lowest and highest spectral windows centered at $8.0$ and $9.9$ GHz, respectively, and find the $8.0$ GHz light curve lagging $18.37^{+2.17}_{-2.18}$ minutes behind the $9.9$ GHz light curve. This is the first time lag found in Sgr A*'s light curve across a narrow radio frequency bandwidth. We separate th…
We present and analyze ALMA submillimeter observations from a multi-wavelength campaign of Sgr A* during 18 July 2019. In addition to the submillimeter, we utilize concurrent mid-IR (Spitzer) and X-ray (Chandra) observations. The submillimeter emission lags less than $δt\approx30$ minutes behind the mid-IR data. However, the entire submillimeter flare was not observed, raising the possibility that the time delay is a consequence of incomplete sampling of the light curve. The decay of the submillimeter emission is not consistent with synchrotron cooling. Therefore, we analyze these data adoptin…
In this paper we examine properties of the variable source Sgr A* in the near-infrared (NIR) using a very extensive Ks-band data set from NACO/VLT observations taken 2004 to 2009. We investigate the variability of Sgr A* with two different photometric methods and analyze its flux distribution. We find Sgr A* is continuously emitting and continuously variable in the near-infrared, with some variability occurring on timescales as long as weeks. The flux distribution can be described by a lognormal distribution at low intrinsic fluxes (<~5 mJy, dereddened with A_{Ks}=2.5). The lognormal distribut…
In the last several years, a number of observing campaigns of the massive black hole Sgr A* has been carried out in order to address two important issues: one concerns the underluminous nature of Sgr A* with its bolometric luminosity being several orders of magnitude less than those of its more massive counterparts. It turns out that the angular momentum of the ionized stellar winds from orbiting stars in one or two disks orbiting Sgr A* could be a critical factor in estimating accurately the accretion rate unto Sgr A*. A net angular momentum of ionized gas feeding Sgr A* could lower the Bondi…
We present the first spectral energy distributions produced self-consistently by 2.5D general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamical (GRMHD) numerical simulations, where radiative cooling is included in the dynamical calculation. As a case study, we focus on the accretion flow around the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which has the best constrained physical parameters. We compare the simulated spectra to the observational data of Sgr A* and explore the parameter space of our model to determine the effect of changing the initial magnetic field configuratio…
The Galactic center black hole candidate Sgr A* is the best target for studies of low-luminosity accretion physics, including with near-infrared and submillimeter wavelength long baseline interferometry experiments. Here we compare images and spectra generated from a parameter survey of general relativistic MHD simulations to a set of radio to near-infrared observations of Sgr A*. Our models span the limits of weak and strong magnetization and use a range of sub-grid prescriptions for electron heating. We find two classes of scenarios can explain the broad shape of the submillimeter spectral p…
Infrared Line Diagnostics Fail to Constrain Sgr A*'s UV Output
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Trottier Space Institute at McGill（麦吉尔大学特罗蒂尔太空研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics（加拿大理论天体物理研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy（马克斯·普朗克射电天文研究所）
On 28 May 2008, the Swift satellite detected the first reactivation of SGR 1627-41 since its discovery in 1998. Following this event we began an observing campaign in near infrared wavelengths to search for a possible counterpart inside the error circle of this SGR, which is expected to show flaring activity simultaneous to the high energy flares or at least some variability as compared to the quiescent state. For the follow-up we used the 0.6m REM robotic telescope at La Silla Observatory, which allowed a fast response within 24 hours and, through director discretionary time, the 8.2m Very La…
Daily X-ray flaring represents an enigmatic phenomenon of Sgr A$^{\star}$ --- the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. We report initial results from a systematic X-ray study of this phenomenon, based on extensive {\it Chandra} observations obtained from 1999 to 2012, totaling about 4.5 Ms. We detect flares, using a combination of the maximum likelihood and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, which allow for a direct accounting for the pile-up effect in the modeling of the flare lightcurves and an optimal use of the data, as well as the measurements of flare parameters, including…
Recent high resolution observations of the Galactic center black hole allow for direct comparison with accretion disk simulations. We compare two-temperature synchrotron emission models from three dimensional, general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to millimeter observations of Sgr A*. Fits to very long baseline interferometry and spectral index measurements disfavor the monochromatic face-on black hole shadow models from our previous work. Inclination angles \le 20 degrees are ruled out to 3 σ. We estimate the inclination and position angles of the black hole, as well as the ele…
Based on Bremer et al. (2011) and Eckart et al. (2012) we report on simultaneous observations and modeling of the millimeter, near-infrared, and X-ray flare emission of the source Sagittarius A* (SgrA*) associated with the super-massive black hole at the Galactic Center. We study physical processes giving rise to the variable emission of SgrA* from the radio to the X-ray domain. To explain the statistics of the observed variability of the (sub-)mm spectrum of SgrA*, we use a sample of simultaneous NIR/X-ray flare peaks and model the flares using a synchrotron and SSC mechanism. The observation…
This paper reports measurements of Sgr A* made with NACO in L' -band (3.80 um), Ks-band (2.12 um) and H-band (1.66 um) and with VISIR in N-band (11.88 um) at the ESO VLT, as well as with XMM-Newton at X-ray (2-10 keV) wavelengths. On 4 April, 2007, a very bright flare was observed from Sgr A* simultaneously at L'-band and X-ray wavelengths. No emission was detected using VISIR. The resulting SED has a blue slope (beta > 0 for nuL_nu ~ nu^beta, consistent with nuL_nu ~ nu^0.4) between 12 micron and 3.8 micron. For the first time our high quality data allow a detailed comparison of infrared and …
By solving radiative transfer equations, we examine three-dimensional radiative properties of a magnetohydrodynamic accretion flow model confronting with the observed spectrum of Sgr A*, in the vicinity of supermassive black hole at the Galactic centre. As a result, we find that the core of radio emission is larger than the size of the event horizon shadow and its peak location is shifted from the gravitational centre. We also find that the self-absorbed synchrotron emissions by the superposition of thermal electrons within a few tens of the Schwartzschild radius can account for low-frequency …
The supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), at the centre of the Milky Way undergoes regular flaring activity which is thought to arise from the innermost region of the accretion flow. We performed the monitoring observations of the Galactic Centre to study the flux-density variations at 3mm using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) between 2010 and 2014. We obtain the light curves of Sgr A* by subtracting the contributions from the extended emission around it, and the elevation and time dependent gains of the telescope. We perform structure function analysis and the Bayesia…
The recent VLBI observation of the Galactic center black hole candidate Sgr A* at 1.3mm shows source structure on event-horizon scales. This detection enables a direct comparison of the emission region with models of the accretion flow onto the black hole. We present the first results from time-dependent radiative transfer of general relativistic MHD simulation data, and compare simulated synchrotron images at black hole spin a=0.9 with the VLBI measurements. After tuning the accretion rate to match the millimeter flux, we find excellent agreement between predicted and observed visibilities, e…
The so-called S2 star reached its closest approach to the massive black hole (BH) at around 1500 $R_\mathrm{s}$ in May 2018. It has been proposed that the interaction of its stellar wind with the high-density accretion flow at this distance from Sgr A* will lead to a detectable, month-long X-ray flare. Our goal is to verify whether or not the S2 star wind can be used as a diagnostic tool to infer the properties of the accretion flow towards Sgr A* at its pericentre (an unprobed distance regime), putting important constraints on BH accretion flow models. We run a series of three-dimensional ada…
High-resolution, multi-wavelength, and time-domain observations of the Galactic centre black hole candidate, Sgr A*, allow for a direct test of contemporary accretion theory. To date, all models have assumed alignment between the accretion disc and black hole angular momentum axes, but this is unjustified for geometrically thick accretion flows like that onto Sgr A*. Instead, we calculate images and spectra from a set of simulations of accretion flows misaligned ('tilted') by 15 degrees from the black hole spin axis and compare them with millimetre (mm) to near-infrared (NIR) observations. Non…
Sources of X-rays such as active galactic nuclei and X-ray binaries are often variable by orders of magnitude in luminosity over timescales of years. During and after these flares the surrounding gas is out of chemical and thermal equilibrium. We introduce a new implementation of X-ray radiative transfer coupled to a time-dependent chemical network for use in 3D magnetohydrodynamical simulations. A static fractal molecular cloud is irradiated with X-rays of different intensity, and the chemical and thermal evolution of the cloud are studied. For a simulated $10^5$ M$_\odot$ fractal cloud an X-…
