Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Multimessenger

Friday, 13 September 2024, 17:07   (S25)

Impact of non-thermal particles on event horizon scales

Ainara Saiz-Pérez, Christian M. Fromm
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

The accretion of matter and the formation of relativistic jets in the vicinity of supermassive black holes are closely associated with the acceleration of particles to non-thermal distributions, but the mechanisms behind the coupling of relevant physical processes are not yet fully understood. M87*, the only source for which the black hole horizon scales and jet emission have been spatially resolved, may provide us with an insight into these physical mechanisms. We specifically aim to understand the role and importance of non-thermal particles in the structures observed by mm-VLBI techniques. For this purpose, we carried out general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of a jet launching scenario, modelled after M87*. We followed up with radiative transfer calculations, accounting for the synchrotron emission of particles in a hybrid distribution, thermal in the accretion disk and non-thermal in the jet. The non-thermal particles are injected in regions subject to magnetic reconnection, following distributions modelled after particle-in-cell simulations. We find that non-thermal particles may play a crucial role in understanding the images of black hole environments on event horizon scales.