Correlation between Flux and Spectral Index during Flares in Sagittarius A*

Jonathan M. Bittner1, Siming Liu2, Christopher L. Fryer2,3 and Vahé Petrosian4


(1) Physics Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8120
(2) Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545
(3) Physics Department, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721
(4) Center for Space Science and Astrophysics, Department of Physics and Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

Paper: ApJ, submitted (Tue Aug 8 2006)

EPrint Server: astro-ph/0608232


Abstract:

Flares in Sagittarius A* are produced by hot plasmas within a few Schwarzschild radii of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center. The recent detection of a correlation between the spectral index and flux during a near infrared (NIR) flare provides a means to conduct detailed investigations of the plasma heating and radiation processes. We study the evolution of the electron distribution function under the influence of a turbulent magnetic field in a hot collisionless plasma. The magnetic field, presumably generated through instabilities in the accretion flow, can both heat the plasma via resonant wave-particle coupling and cool the electrons via radiation. The electron distribution can generally be approximated as relativistic Maxwellian. To account for the observed correlation, we find that the magnetic field needs to be anti-correlated with the electron ``temperature''. NIR and X-ray light curves are produced for a cooling and a heating phase. The model predicts simultaneous flare activity in the NIR and X-ray bands, which can be compared with observations. These results can be applied to MHD simulations to study the radiative characteristics of collisionless plasmas, especially accretion flows in low-luminosity AGNs.


Preprints available from the authors at jon.bittner@gmail.com , or the raw TeX (no figures) if you click here.

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