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State-of-the-art Simulations of Line-driven Accretion Disc Winds: Realistic Radiation-hydrodynamics Leads to Weaker Outflows by Higginbottom, Nick; Scepi, Nicolas; Knigge, Christian; Long, Knox S.; Matthews, James H.; Sim, Stuart A. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is State-of-the-art Simulations of Line-driven Accretion Disc Winds: Realistic Radiation-hydrodynamics Leads to Weaker Outflows about?

Disc winds are a common feature in accreting astrophysical systems on all scales. In active galactic nuclei (AGN) and accreting white dwarfs (AWDs), specifically, radiation pressure mediated by spectral lines is a promising mechanism for driving these outflows. Previous hydrodynamical simulations have largely supported this idea, but relied on highly approximate treatments of ionization and radiative transfer. Given the sensitivity of line driving to the ionization state and radiation field in the outflow, here we present a new method for carrying out 2.5D radiation-hydrodynamic simulations that takes full account of the frequency-dependent radiative transfer through the wind, the corresponding ionization state and the resulting radiative accelerations. Applying our method to AWDs, we find that it is much harder to drive a powerful line-driven outflow when the interaction between matter and radiation is treated self-consistently. This conclusion is robust to changes in the adopted system parameters. The fundamental difficulty is that discs luminous enough to drive such a wind are also hot enough to over-ionize it. As a result, the mass-loss rates in our simulations are much lower t

Author

Higginbottom, Nick; Scepi, Nicolas; Knigge, Christian; Long, Knox S.; Matthews, James H.; Sim, Stuart A.

Published

2023

Language

EN