The internal Faraday screen of Sagittarius A* Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Wielgus M.
  2. Issaoun S.
  3. Marti-Vidal I.
  4. Emami R.
  5. Moscibrodzka M.,Brinkerink Ch.D.
  6. Goddi C.
  7. Fomalont E.
  8. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

We report on 85-101 GHz light curves of the Galactic Center supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), observed in April 2017 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This study of high-cadence full-Stokes data provides new measurements of the fractional linear polarization at a 1-2% level resolved in 4 s time segments, and stringent upper limits on the fractional circular polarization at 0.3%. We compare these findings to ALMA light curves of Sgr A* at 212-230GHz observed three days later, characterizing a steep depolarization of the source at frequencies below about 150GHz. We obtain time-dependent rotation measure (RM) values, with the mean RM at 85-101GHz being a factor of two lower than that at 212-230GHz. Together with the rapid temporal variability of the RM and its different statistical characteristics in both frequency bands, these results indicate that the Faraday screen in Sgr A* is largely internal, with about half of the Faraday rotation taking place inside the inner 10 gravitational radii, contrary to the common external Faraday screen assumption. We then demonstrate how this observation can be reconciled with theoretical models of radiatively inefficient accretion flows for a reasonable set of physical parameters. Comparisons with numerical general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations suggest that the innermost part of the accretion flow in Sgr A* is much less variable than these models predict; in particular, the observed magnetic field structure appears to be coherent and persistent.

Keywords
  1. galactic-center
  2. black-holes
  3. millimeter-astronomy
  4. submillimeter-astronomy
  5. polarimetry
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2024A&A...682A..97W
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History

2024-02-09T09:00:07Z
Resource record created
2024-02-09T08:04:08Z
Updated
2024-02-09T09:00:07Z
Created

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr