English

Generation of a Fireball in AGN Hot Plasmas

Astrophysics 2008-11-26 v1

Abstract

Motivated by relativistic jets observed in active galactic nuclei (AGN), we simulate outflows of electron-positron pairs strongly coupled with photons from normal electron-proton plasmas. Using multi-fluid approximation and a Monte Carlo method of radiative transfer, we obtain spherically symmetric, steady solutions of radiation and pair outflows for the luminosity L1047L \leq 10^{47} erg s1{\rm s^{-1}}. For microphysics, Coulomb scattering, Compton scattering, bremsstrahlung, electron-positron pair annihilation and creation are taken into account. Although a significant amount of pairs outflow by powerful radiative force with a mildly relativistic velocity, the temperature is not high enough to avoid pair annihilation before the fireball becomes optically thin to scattering. Several caveats in the simulations are also discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0611142,
  title  = {Generation of a Fireball in AGN Hot Plasmas},
  author = {Katsuaki Asano and Fumio Takahara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0611142},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

20 pages, 7figures. accepted for publication in ApJ