English

Supercollapsars and their X-ray Bursts

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-05-14 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

The very first stars in the Universe can be very massive, up to 103M10^3M_\odot. If born in large numbers, such massive stars can have strong impact on the subsequent star formation, producing strong ionising radiation and contaminating the primordial gas with heavy elements. They would leave behind massive black holes that could act as seeds for growing supermassive black holes of active galactic nuclei. Given the anticipated fast rotation, such stars would end their live as supermassive collapsars and drive powerful magnetically-dominated jets. In this letter we investigate the possibility of observing the bursts of high-energy emission similar to the Long Gamma Ray Bursts associated with normal collapsars. We show that during the collapse of supercollapsars, the Blandford-Znajek mechanism can produce jets as powerful as few×1052\times10^{52}erg/s and release up to 105410^{54}erg of the black hole rotational energy. Due to the higher intrinsic time scale and higher redshift the initial bright phase of the burst can last for about 10410^4 seconds, whereas the central engine would remain active for about one day. Due to the high redshift the burst spectrum is expected to be soft, with the spectral energy distribution peaking at around 20-30keV. The peak total flux density is relatively low, 107ergcm2s110^{-7}{erg} {cm}^{-2} {s}^{-1}, but not prohibitive. If one supercollapsar is produced per every mini-halo of dark matter arising from the 3-σ\sigma cosmological fluctuations then the whole sky frequency of such bursts could reach several tens per year.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0909.0857,
  title  = {Supercollapsars and their X-ray Bursts},
  author = {S. S. Komissarov and M. V. Barkov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.0857},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in MNRAS, New calculations based on the Bethe's model of progenitor are given

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