Astrophysics

We examine radiative standing shocks in advective accretion flows around stellar-mass black holes by 2D radiation hydrodynamic simulations, focusing on the super-Eddington accreting flow. Under a set of input flow parameters responsible for the standing shock, the shock location on the equator decreases toward the event horizon with an increasing accretion rate. The optically thin and hot gas in the narrow funnel region along the rotational axis changes gradually into a dense and optically thick state with the increasingly dense gas transported from the base of the radiative shock near the equator. As a result, the luminosity becomes as high as ~ 10 40 erg s ?? , and the radiation shows a strongly anisotropic distribution around the rotational axis and then very low edge-on luminosity as ~ 10 36 erg s ?? . The mass outflow rate from the outer boundary is high as ~ 10 ?? and 10 ?? M ??y r ?? but most of the outflow is originated through the radial outer boundary and may be observed over a wide wind region. The models show approximately black body spectra with a temperature of 5? 10 6 ??? 10 7 K at the vertical outer boundary surface. The radiative shock models with the super-Eddington luminosities show a possible model for the superaccretor SS 433 and Ultraluminous X-ray sources with stellar-mass black holes.

For the duration of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope's mission, approximately one-third of the point sources detected have been noted as "unassociated," meaning that they seem to have no known counterpart at any other wavelength/frequency. This mysterious part of the gamma-ray sky is perhaps one of the largest unknowns in current astronomical pursuits, and as such has been probed extensively by various techniques at various frequencies. Radio frequencies have been perhaps one of the most fruitful, producing a large fraction of the identified and associated Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and pulsars noted in each update of the point source catalogs. Here we present a catalog of 7432 radio counterpart candidates for unassociated gamma-ray fields in the 2nd Data Release of the 4th Fermi Point Source Catalog (4FGL-DR2). A description of the catalog and source types is provided followed by a discussion that demonstrates how the results of this work will aid new associations and identifications. As part of this work, we also present a first catalog derived from "quicklook" images of the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS).

A number of possible pulsar radio emission mechanisms is based on instabilities of the relative streaming and beams in their relativistic electron-positron pair plasma. At saturation the unstable waves can form, in principle, stable solitary waves which could emit the observed intense radio signals. We searched for the proper plasma parameters which would lead to the formation of solitons, investigated their properties and dynamics as well as the resulting oscillations of electrons and positrons possibly leading to radio wave emission. We utilized a one-dimensional version of the relativistic Particle-in-Cell code Acronym, initialized an appropriately parameterized one-dimensional Maxwell-Jüttner velocity space particle distribution and studied the evolution of the resulting streaming instability in the strong pulsar magnetic fields. We found that for plasmas with inverse temperatures ???.66 or relative electron-positron drift speeds with Lorentz factors γ>40 , strong electrostatic solitons form associated with L- and A-mode plasma waves. The parameters of the solitons fulfill the wave emission conditions. For appropriate pulsar parameters the resulting energy densities of L-mode solitons can reach up to 1.1? 10 5 erg ??cm ?? while those of A-mode solitons reach only up to 1.2? 10 4 erg ??cm ?? . Estimated energy densities of up to 7? 10 12 erg ??cm ?? suffice to explain pulsar nanoshots.

We present the results of a weekly monitoring of the new black hole candidate X-ray binary MAXI J1631-472 carried out with the MeerKAT radio interferometer, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument, during its 2018-2019 outburst. The source exhibits a number of X-ray states, in particular both high- and low-luminosity hard states bracketed by extended soft states. Radio flaring is observed shortly after a transition from hard/intermediate states to the soft state. This is broadly in agreement with existing empirical models, but its extended duration hints at multiple unresolved flares and/or jet-ISM interactions. In the hard state radio:X-ray plane, the source is revealed to be 'radio quiet' at high luminosities, but to rejoin the `standard' track at lower luminosities, an increasingly commonly-observed pattern of behaviour.

The study of stripped-envelope core-collapse supernovae (SNe), with evidence for strong interaction of SN ejecta with the circumstellar medium (CSM), provides insights into the pre-supernova progenitor, and a fast-forwarded view of the progenitor mass-loss history. In this context, we present late-time radio observations of SN2004dk, a type Ibc supernova located in the galaxy, NGC 6118, at a distance of d L ??3 Mpc. About 15 years after explosion, SN2004dk has shown evidence for H α emission, possibly linked to the SN ejecta interacting with an H-rich CSM. Using data from the VLA Low Band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (VLITE), we confirm the presence of a late-time radio re-brightening accompanying the observed H α emission. We model the SN2004dk radio light curves within the (spherically symmetric) synchrotron-self-absorption (SSA) model. Within this model, our VLITE observations combined with previously collected VLA data favor an interpretation of SN2004dk as a strongly CSM-interacting radio SN going through a complex environment shaped by a non-steady mass-loss from the SN progenitor.

Magnetars are slowly-rotating neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields ( 10 13??5 G), episodically emitting ??00 ms long X-ray bursts with energies of ??10 40??1 erg. Rarely, they produce extremely bright, energetic giant flares that begin with a short ( ??.2 s), intense flash, followed by fainter, longer lasting emission modulated by the magnetar spin period (typically 2-12 s), thus confirming their origin. Over the last 40 years, only three such flares have been observed in our local group; they all suffered from instrumental saturation due to their extreme intensity. It has been proposed that extra-galactic giant flares likely constitute a subset of short gamma-ray bursts, noting that the sensitivity of current instrumentation prevents us from detecting the pulsating tail, while the initial bright flash is readily observable out to distances ??0??0 Mpc. Here, we report X- and gamma-ray observations of GRB 200415A, which exhibits a rapid onset, very fast time variability, flat spectra and significant sub-millisecond spectral evolution. These attributes match well with those expected for a giant flare from an extra-galactic magnetar, noting that GRB 200415A is directionally associated with the galaxy NGC 253 ( ??3.5 Mpc away). The detection of ?? MeV photons provides definitive evidence for relativistic motion of the emitting plasma. The observed rapid spectral evolution can naturally be generated by radiation emanating from such rapidly-moving gas in a rotating magnetar.

Following a tidal disruption event (TDE), the accretion rate can evolve from quiescent to near-Eddington levels and back over months - years timescales. This provides a unique opportunity to study the formation and evolution of the accretion flow around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We present two years of multi-wavelength monitoring observations of the TDE AT2018fyk at X-ray, UV, optical and radio wavelengths. We identify three distinct accretion states and two state transitions between them. These appear remarkably similar to the behaviour of stellar-mass black holes in outburst. The X-ray spectral properties show a transition from a soft (thermal-dominated) to a hard (power-law dominated) spectral state around L bol ??few ? 10 ?? L Edd , and the strengthening of the corona over time ??100--200 days after the UV/optical peak. Contemporaneously, the spectral energy distribution (in particular, the UV-to-X-ray spectral slope α ox ) shows a pronounced softening as the outburst progresses. The X-ray timing properties also show a marked change, initially dominated by variability at long ( > day) timescales while a high frequency ( ??10 ?? Hz) component emerges after the transition into the hard state. At late times ( ??500 days after peak), a second accretion state transition occurs, from the hard into the quiescent state, as identified by the sudden collapse of the bolometric (X-ray+UV) emission to levels below 10 ??.4 L Edd . Our findings illustrate that TDEs can be used to study the scale (in)variance of accretion processes in individual SMBHs. Consequently, they provide a new avenue to study accretion states over seven orders of magnitude in black hole mass, removing limitations inherent to commonly used ensemble studies.

In this work we study rapidly rotating stars by considering the Rastall theory of gravity. We obtain and solve the equations by numerical methods for two usual parametrization of polytropic stars. Then the mass-radius relations, moments of inertia and other results of interest are obtained and compared with the ones for non-rotating stars.

We report polarization properties for eight narrowband bursts from FRB 121102 that have been re-detected in a high-frequency (4-8 GHz) Breakthrough Listen observation with the Green Bank Telescope, originally taken on 2017 August 26. The bursts were found to exhibit nearly 100% linear polarization, Faraday rotation measures (RM) bordering 9.3 ? 10 4 rad-m ?? , and stable polarization position angles (PA), all of which agree with burst properties previously reported for FRB 121102 at the same epoch. We confirm that these detections are indeed physical bursts with limited spectral occupancies and further support the use of sub-banded search techniques in FRB detection.

Cygnus X-1 is a well-studied persistent black hole X-ray binary. Recently, the three parameters needed to estimate the black hole spin of this system, namely the black hole mass M , the orbital inclination i and the source distance D , have been updated. In this work we redetermine the spin parameter using the continuum-fitting technique for those updated parameter values. Based on the assumption that the spin axis of the black hole is aligned with the orbital plane, we fit the thermal disk component to a fully relativistic thin accretion disk model. The error in the spin estimate arising from the combined observational uncertainties is obtained via Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. We demonstrate that, without considering the counteracting torque effect, the new spin parameter is constrained to be a ??>0.9985 (3 ? ), which confirms that the spin of the black hole in Cygnus X-1 is extreme.