A Universal Power-law Prescription for Variability from Synthetic Images of Black Hole Accretion Flows

Boris Georgiev , Dominic W. Pesce , Avery E. Broderick , George N. Wong , Vedant Dhruv , Maciek Wielgus , Charles F. Gammie , Chi-Kwan Chan , Koushik Chatterjee , Razieh Emami , Yosuke Mizuno , Roman Gold , Christian M. Fromm , Angelo Ricarte , Doosoo Yoon , Abhishek V. Joshi , Ben Prather , Alejandro Cruz-Osorio , Michael D. Johnson , Oliver Porth , Héctor Olivares , Ziri Younsi , Luciano Rezzolla , Jesse Vos , Richard Qiu , Antonios Nathanail , Ramesh Narayan , Andrew Chael , Richard Anantua , Monika Moscibrodzka , Kazunori Akiyama , Antxon Alberdi , Walter Alef , Juan Carlos Algaba , Keiichi Asada , Rebecca Azulay , Uwe Bach , Anne-Kathrin Baczko , David Ball , Mislav Baloković , John Barrett , Michi Bauböck , Bradford A. Benson , Dan Bintley , Lindy Blackburn , Raymond Blundell , Katherine L. Bouman , Geoffrey C. Bower , Hope Boyce , Michael Bremer , Christiaan D. Brinkerink , Roger Brissenden , Silke Britzen , Dominique Broguiere , Thomas Bronzwaer , Sandra Bustamante , Do-Young Byun , John E. Carlstrom , Chiara Ceccobello , Shami Chatterjee , Ming-Tang Chen , Yongjun Chen , Xiaopeng Cheng , Ilje Cho , Pierre Christian , Nicholas S. Conroy , John E. Conway , James M. Cordes , Thomas M. Crawford , Geoffrey B. Crew , Yuzhu Cui , Jordy Davelaar , Mariafelicia de Laurentis , Roger Deane , Jessica Dempsey , Gregory Desvignes (1) , Jason Dexter , Sheperd S. Doeleman , Sean Dougal , Sergio A. Dzib , Ralph P. Eatough , Heino Falcke , Joseph Farah , Vincent L. Fish , Ed Fomalont , H. Alyson Ford , Raquel Fraga-Encinas , William T. Freeman , Per Friberg , Antonio Fuentes , Peter Galison , Roberto García , Olivier Gentaz , Ciriaco Goddi , Arturo I. Gómez-Ruiz , José L. Gómez , Minfeng Gu , Mark Gurwell , Kazuhiro Hada , Daryl Haggard , Kari Haworth , Michael H. Hecht , Ronald Hesper , Dirk Heumann , Luis C. Ho , Paul Ho , Mareki Honma , Chih-Wei L. Huang , Lei Huang , David H. Hughes , Shiro Ikeda , C. M. Violette Impellizzeri , Makoto Inoue , Sara Issaoun , David J. James , Buell T. Jannuzi , Michael Janssen , Britton Jeter , Wu Jiang , Alejandra Jiménez-Rosales , Svetlana Jorstad , Taehyun Jung , Mansour Karami , Ramesh Karuppusamy , Tomohisa Kawashima , Garrett K. Keating , Mark Kettenis , Dong-Jin Kim , Jae-Young Kim , Jongsoo Kim , Junhan Kim , Motoki Kino , Jun Yi Koay , Prashant Kocherlakota , Yutaro Kofuji , Patrick M. Koch , Shoko Koyama , Carsten Kramer , Michael Kramer , Thomas P. Krichbaum , Cheng-Yu Kuo , Noemi La Bella , Tod R. Lauer , Daeyoung Lee , Sang-Sung Lee , Luis Lehner , Po Kin Leung , Aviad Levis , Zhiyuan Li , Rocco Lico , Greg Lindahl , Michael Lindqvist , Mikhail Lisakov , Jun Liu , Kuo Liu , Elisabetta Liuzzo , Wen-Ping Lo , Andrei P. Lobanov , Laurent Loinard , Colin J. Lonsdale , Ru-Sen Lu , Jirong Mao , Nicola Marchili , Sera Markoff , Daniel P. Marrone , Alan P. Marscher , Iván Martí-Vidal , Satoki Matsushita , Lynn D. Matthews , Karl M. Menten , Daniel Michalik , Izumi Mizuno , James M. Moran , Kotaro Moriyama , Cornelia Müller , Alejandro Mus , Gibwa Musoke , Ioannis Myserlis , Andrew Nadolski , Hiroshi Nagai , Neil M. Nagar , Masanori Nakamura , Gopal Narayanan , Iniyan Natarajan , Santiago Navarro Fuentes , Joey Neilsen , Roberto Neri , Chunchong Ni , Aristeidis Noutsos , Michael A. Nowak , Junghwan Oh , Hiroki Okino , Gisela N. Ortiz-León , Tomoaki Oyama , Daniel C. M. Palumbo , Georgios Filippos Paraschos , Jongho Park , Harriet Parsons , Nimesh Patel , Ue-Li Pen , Vincent Piétu , Richard Plambeck , Aleksandar Popstefanija , Felix M. Pötzl , Jorge A. Preciado-López , Hung-Yi Pu , Venkatessh Ramakrishnan , Ramprasad Rao , Mark G. Rawlings , Alexander W. Raymond , Bart Ripperda , Freek Roelofs , Alan Rogers , Eduardo Ros , Cristina Romero-Cañizales , Arash Roshanineshat , Helge Rottmann , Alan L. Roy , Ignacio Ruiz , Chet Ruszczyk , Kazi L. J. Rygl , Salvador Sánchez , David Sánchez-Argüelles , Miguel Sánchez-Portal , Mahito Sasada , Kaushik Satapathy , Tuomas Savolainen , F. Peter Schloerb , Jonathan Schonfeld , Karl-Friedrich Schuster , Lijing Shao , Zhiqiang Shen , Des Small , Bong Won Sohn , Jason Soohoo , Kamal Souccar , He Sun , Fumie Tazaki , Alexandra J. Tetarenko , Paul Tiede , Remo P. J. Tilanus , Michael Titus , Pablo Torne , Efthalia Traianou , Tyler Trent , Sascha Trippe , Matthew Turk , Ilse van Bemmel , Huib Jan van Langevelde , Daniel R. van Rossum , Jan Wagner , Derek Ward-Thompson , John Wardle , Jonathan Weintroub , Norbert Wex , Robert Wharton , Kaj Wiik , Gunther Witzel , Michael F. Wondrak , Qingwen Wu , Paul Yamaguchi , André Young , Ken Young , Feng Yuan , Ye-Fei Yuan , J. Anton Zensus , Shuo Zhang , Guang-Yao Zhao , Shan-Shan Zhao

1 LESIA - Laboratoire d'études spatiales et d'instrumentation en astrophysique = Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics

We present a framework for characterizing the spatiotemporal power spectrum of the variability expected from the horizon-scale emission structure around supermassive black holes, and we apply this framework to a library of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations and associated general relativistic ray-traced images relevant for Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of Sgr A*. We find that the variability power spectrum is generically a red-noise process in both the temporal and spatial dimensions, with the peak in power occurring on the longest timescales and largest spatial scales. When both the time-averaged source structure and the spatially integrated light-curve variability are removed, the residual power spectrum exhibits a universal broken power-law behavior. On small spatial frequencies, the residual power spectrum rises as the square of the spatial frequency and is proportional to the variance in the centroid of emission. Beyond some peak in variability power, the residual power spectrum falls as that of the time-averaged source structure, which is similar across simulations; this behavior can be naturally explained if the variability arises from a multiplicative random field that has a steeper high-frequency power-law index than that of the time-averaged source structure. We briefly explore the ability of power spectral variability studies to constrain physical parameters relevant for the GRMHD simulations, which can be scaled to provide predictions for black holes in a range of systems in the optically thin regime. We present specific expectations for the behavior of the M87* and Sgr A* accretion flows as observed by the EHT.

Keywords: Stellar accretion; Magnetohydrodynamics; Galactic center; Black holes; Very long baseline interferometry; 1578; 1964; 565; 162; 1769

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]; Astrophysics [astro-ph]

Boris Georgiev, Dominic W. Pesce, Avery E. Broderick, George N. Wong, Vedant Dhruv, et al.. A Universal Power-law Prescription for Variability from Synthetic Images of Black Hole Accretion Flows. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022, 930, ⟨10.3847/2041-8213/ac65eb⟩. ⟨insu-03713308⟩