Accretion-modified Stars in Accretion Disks of Active Galactic Nuclei: Slowly Transient Appearance

Abstract

Compact objects are expected to exist in the accretion disks of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and in the presence of such a dense environment (∼1014 cm−3), they will form a new kind of stellar population denoted as accretion-modified stars (AMSs). This hypothesis is supported by recent LIGO/Virgo detection of the mergers of very high-mass stellar binary black holes (BHs). We show that the AMSs will be trapped by the SMBH disk within a typical AGN lifetime. In the context of SMBH disks, the rates of Bondi accretion onto BHs are ∼109 L Edd/c 2, where L Edd is the Eddington luminosity and c is the speed of light. Outflows developed from the hyper-Eddington accretion strongly impact the Bondi sphere and induce episodic accretion. We show that the hyper-Eddington accretion will be halted after an accretion interval of t a ∼ 105 m 1 s, where m 1 = m •/10M ⊙ is the BH mass. The kinetic energy of the outflows accumulated during t a is equivalent to 10 supernovae driving an explosion of the Bondi sphere and developing blast waves. We demonstrate that a synchrotron flare from relativistic electrons accelerated by the blast waves peaks in the soft X-ray band (∼0.1 keV), significantly contributing to the radio, optical, UV, and soft X-ray emission of typical radio-quiet quasars. External inverse Compton scattering of the electrons peaks around 40 GeV and is detectable through Fermi-LAT. The flare, decaying with t −6/5 with a few months, will appear as a slowly varying transient. The flares, occurring at a rate of a few per year in radio-quiet quasars, provide a new mechanism for explaining AGN variability.