Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 9–12, 2022; New York
Session D03: Accretion Across the Mass ScaleInvited Live Streamed
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Sponsoring Units: DAP Chair: Michael Zevin, University of Chicago Room: Salon 1 |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
D03.00001: A Renaissance in Accretion Disk Physics: Optical Space-Based Timing from Exoplanet Satellites Invited Speaker: Krista Lynne Smith While X-ray satellites have been privileged for years to explore short-timescale, continuous light curves of all manner of high-energy targets, optical timing has long been hampered by the vagaries of ground-based observing. While typically long-baseline, ground-based optical light curves are beset by gaps of days, to weeks, to months, and have low photometric precision. Fortunately, the advent of high-cadence, long-baseline, very high precision space-based optical timing instruments brought on by the search for Earth-like exoplanets has provided a timely solution to this problem. I will present the challenges and rewarding results that have arisen from studies of AGN variability with the exoplanet-hunting satellites Kepler and TESS, including possible scaling relations of characteristic timescale with mass, blazar jet physics, quasi-periodic oscillations, the search for intermediate-mass black holes, and more. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
D03.00002: Accretion in Black Hole X-ray Binaries Invited Speaker: Thomas J Maccarone I will discuss the process of accretion and ejection in black hole X-ray binaries. Because stellar mass black holes are nearby and in binary systems, their masses can be estimated better than all but a handful of active galactic nuclei's black holes. Recent improvements in distance estimates from VLBI measurements and from Gaia now give them comparable distance uncertainties as well. I will emphasize how we can use variability information to understand these systems to get at the properties of the accreting black holes (e.g. spins and perhaps masses), and at the processes that cause jets to be produced in these systems. I will discuss how multi-wavelength data sets are essential for this work, and will also discuss how current and future projects across the wavelength range may enhance capabilities for studying all these topics. |
Saturday, April 9, 2022 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
D03.00003: Advances in studies of stellar tidal disruption events, AGN and quasi-periodic eruptions Invited Speaker: Dheeraj R Pasham In recent years, the advent of wide-field optical imaging surveys has opened our eyes to some of the most energetic events in the Universe. These include extreme brightness variations from active and passive supermassive black holes in the nearby Universe. While these objects are initially identified in the optical band, X-ray follow-up is proving to be essential for understanding the underlying physical mechanisms in these systems. With a large effective area in soft X-rays (0.25-10 keV), good spectral resolution, and superior ability to respond promptly to transient triggers and keep monitoring them, the NICER mission has made remarkable strides in our understanding of these sources. I will present recent scientific advances enabled by NICER in the fields of stellar tidal disruption events (TDEs) and active galactic nuclei (AGN). I will describe NICER discoveries of quasi-periodic eruptions from the nuclei of nearby galaxies (candidates for extreme mass-ratio inspirals), the formation (and destruction) of X-ray coronae around supermassive black holes in TDEs and changing-look AGN, and evidence of powerful winds/outflows in some of these systems. I will also describe new ways to measure spins of massive black holes using TDEs. |
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