Black Hole Accretion Flow
Poster Number
7
Format
Poster Presentation
Faculty Mentor Name
Helene Flohic
Faculty Mentor Department
Physics
Abstract/Artist Statement
Little is known about the black holes that reside in our universe, so our objective is to increase our knowledge on the subject of black holes, specifically on how the jets that shoot out of black holes come about. Through research done before our project, it is believed that radiatively inefficient accretion flows or (RIAFs) are the turn on points of these jets. Inefficient accretion flows are essentially accretion disks that do not have enough angular momentum in order to maintain a complete accretion disk. Therefore, near the black hole, there is a cloud of charged particles instead of an accretion disk, which is believed to have the potential to turn on a jet from the black hole. These types of black holes lie at the center of galaxies and are called weak active galactic nuclei (weak AGN) as they are not as luminous as regular AGNs. There are far more weak AGNs near us than regular AGNs.We observed weak AGNs in the submillimeter range since the RIAF should outshine the rest of the galaxy in this range. We reduced our sub-millimeter data and included it in previously created spectral energy distribution (SED) graphs. We observed 4 weak AGNS. We found clear evidence of a RIAF in our target, one definitely does not contain an RIAF, and two were inconclusive. The next step is to write a proposal to ask for the use of a larger instrument and gather more data to improve the SED graphs further.
Location
DeRosa University Center, Ballroom
Start Date
25-4-2015 10:00 AM
End Date
25-4-2015 12:00 PM
Black Hole Accretion Flow
DeRosa University Center, Ballroom
Little is known about the black holes that reside in our universe, so our objective is to increase our knowledge on the subject of black holes, specifically on how the jets that shoot out of black holes come about. Through research done before our project, it is believed that radiatively inefficient accretion flows or (RIAFs) are the turn on points of these jets. Inefficient accretion flows are essentially accretion disks that do not have enough angular momentum in order to maintain a complete accretion disk. Therefore, near the black hole, there is a cloud of charged particles instead of an accretion disk, which is believed to have the potential to turn on a jet from the black hole. These types of black holes lie at the center of galaxies and are called weak active galactic nuclei (weak AGN) as they are not as luminous as regular AGNs. There are far more weak AGNs near us than regular AGNs.We observed weak AGNs in the submillimeter range since the RIAF should outshine the rest of the galaxy in this range. We reduced our sub-millimeter data and included it in previously created spectral energy distribution (SED) graphs. We observed 4 weak AGNS. We found clear evidence of a RIAF in our target, one definitely does not contain an RIAF, and two were inconclusive. The next step is to write a proposal to ask for the use of a larger instrument and gather more data to improve the SED graphs further.