Sustained super-Eddington accretion around neutron stars & black holes [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09919


Recently, it was shown that the formation of a photon-trapping surface might not be sufficient to ensure unimpeded super-Eddington (SE) accretion. In light of this finding, here we derive a condition such that sustained and unimpeded SE accretion could be achieved in optically thick slim accretion disks surrounding neutron stars (NSs) and black holes (BHs). For this, we calculate a semi-analytic approximation of the self-similar global radial velocity expression for an advection-dominated flow. Neglecting the influence of relativistic jets on the accretion flow, we find that for Eddington fraction $\dot{m} \gtrsim 1.5 (\epsilon/0.1)^{3/5}$ ($\epsilon$ being the accretion efficiency) sustained SE accretion might be possible in slim disks around BHs irrespective of their spin. The same condition holds for NSs when $\epsilon > 0.03$. The presence of a surface magnetic field might truncate the disk at the magnetosphere of the NS, resulting in lower efficiencies and consequently changing the condition to $\dot{m} > 0.013 \epsilon^{-19/31}$. Our approach suggests that sustained SE accretion might almost always be possible around NSs and BHs hosting accretion disks.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Ghodla and J. Eldridge
Thu, 18 May 23
53/67

Comments: 7 pages, 4 Figures. To appear in MNRAS