Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
And then there was light: what makes astrophysical jets radiative?
Sera Markoff (University of Amsterdam)
Thursday 18/10/2018 @ 11:30, Sala IV piano Battiferro
Accreting black holes of all sizes are capable of launching relativistic jets of magnetised plasma, that we directly observe only via the cooling of particles that are somehow accelerated in these outflows. However at a time when jet-driven electromagnetic counterparts from gravitational wave sources are finally being observed, and the Event Horizon Telescope is making the first images of black hole shadows and jets, we still lack a ‘first principles’, predictive model for the entire range of processes leading to jets and light in the first place. I will first briefly review the rapid progress in our understanding of these processes, driven by a combination of multiwavelength observations, phenomenological modeling and computational general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulations. Then I will describe some key observations that are allowing us to “calibrate” theoretical techniques both to each other and to data, providing new insights into questions about dissipation and particle acceleration that are not yet self-consistently addressed in simulations. Finally I will show some very recent, works-in-progress to give a perspective on how we are trying to better understand these issues, in anticipation of new facilities like CTA and EHT.