Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Feb 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010head...11.0202l&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #11, #2.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.653
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present axisymmetric hydrodynamical simulations of the long-term accretion of a rotating gamma-ray burst progenitor star, a "collapsar,'' onto the central black hole. The simulations were carried out with the adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH in two spatial dimensions and with an explicit shear viscosity. The evolution of the central accretion rate exhibits phases reminiscent of the long GRB gamma-ray and X-ray light curve, which lends support to the proposal by Kumar et al. 2008 that the luminosity is modulated by the central accretion rate. In the first "prompt'' phase characterized by an approximately constant accretion rate, the black hole acquires most of its final mass through supersonic quasiradial accretion occurring at a steady rate of 2 Msun s-1. After a few tens of seconds, an accretion shock sweeps outward through the star. The formation and outward expansion of the accretion shock is accompanied with a sudden and rapid power-law decline in the central accretion rate Mdot t-2.8. The collapsed, shock-heated stellar envelope settles into a thick, low-mass equatorial disk embedded within a massive, pressure-supported atmosphere. After a few hundred seconds, the inflow of low-angular-momentum material in the axial funnel reverses into an outflow from the surface of the thick disk, and the decay of the accretion rate is slowed. While the duration of the "prompt'' phase depends on the resolution in our simulations, we provide an analytical model taking into account neutrino losses that estimates the duration to be 20 s. The model suggests that the steep decline in GRB X-ray light curves is triggered by the circularization of the infalling stellar envelope at radii where the virial temperature is below 1010 K, such that neutrino cooling shuts off. We also present results from 1D simulations of the accretion powered acceleration of the shockwave formed in collapsar models.
Lindner Christopher C.
Milosavljevic Milos
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