7 Black Holes Cannot Blow Jets
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7 Black Holes Cannot Blow Jets Wolfgang Kundt Argelander Institute of Bonn University, Auf dem H¨ugel 71, D-53121 Bonn, Germany Summary. Both Jet Sources (or Bipolar Flows), and Gamma-Ray Bursts, have been known for roughly forty years, and there are various, mutually inconsistent descriptions in the wide literature. Their high energies, and large spatial ranges manifest that they are generated by powerful engines, almost comparable with human high-tech equipment, so that a thorough understanding of their functioning will help us understand the most efficient engines of dead matter. An important detail of these lectures will be the insight that black holes fail to be members of their toolbox; they just cannot do it. 1 Introduction In military language, jet sources are fantastic weapons: they can fire extremely relativistic (microscopic) bullets through distances exceeding megaparsecs with an opening angle of the order of one percent, steadily throughout 108 years, with total powers ranging up to 1048erg/s, and with only minor transport losses during their Myr-long flights. We now know that individual electrons in the dumping sites of the jets can reach Lorentz factors of (even!) 109 – both electrons and positrons – as upper limits to their power-law distributions at ejection. Such feats require long-lived engines, whose foundations must be safely protected against the swallowing habit of black holes (BHs). And even the tiniest among the jet set, newly born brown 2 3 dwarfs with masses 10 MJUP , realize jet lengths of several 10 astronomical units [Whelan et al 2009]. Jet sources have been discovered in the sky, and mapped for more than 30 years, beginning at radio frequencies, closely followed by optical frequencies, then X-rays and γ-rays up to GeV energies, and recently even up to TeV energies, or even PeV energies! Whilst more and more morphological and temporal details have been elaborated, the modes of their generation, propagation, termination, and evolution have found unacceptably diverging treatments in the extended literature. This decades-long stagnation of insight, it appears to me, is predominantly due to the black-hole dictatorship in present-day astrophysics: Black Holes lack persistent, time-varying magnetic fields (for pair formation, and for their post-acceleration via an outgoing strong wave), and lack quasi-static (high-density) deLaval nozzles for the formation of a pair of supersonic antipodal jets, as opposed to fast-rotating magnetized stars inside shearing accretion disks, or differentially rotating magnetized coronas of central galactic disks which have been the preferred jet sources in Kundt & Gopal-Krishna [1980, 2004] as well as in Blome & Kundt [1988], and in Kundt [1989, 1996, 2001a,b, 2002, 2005, 2009a,b]. In my mother language: Schwarze L¨ocher schlucken,siespucken nicht. This compact review of jet formation will begin with a listing of the wide range of observed jet sources, or ‘bipolar flows’, grouping them into a 4-headed family according to their different central engines: (a) newborn stars, (b) forming white dwarfs, (c) middle-aged binary neutron stars, and (d) nuclear-burning centers of galactic disks. Note that these four source types are all expected to anchor a rapidly corotating transverse magnetic moment, whilst the often proposed (stellar-mass) ‘BH-Candidates’ may have been mistaken for neutron stars inside of massive accretion disks, and the ‘supermassive BHs’ at the centers of galaxies mistaken for nuclear-Burning central galactic Disks (BDs). Next, in the section ‘necessary properties’, I will collect a number of plausible constraints on jet sources to function, and sort between viable and non-viable mechanisms for their realisation. The quasi-unique analytical class of jet solutions found in [Kundt & Krishna 2004] will then be reviewed, and subsequently contrasted to the 2 Wolfgang Kundt sources of the GRBs, which are emitted without any jets (in my understanding). Quite similar approaches to jet sources have been taken by Phil Morrison [1981], and by Peter Scheuer [1996], who are both, unfortunately, no longer with us. 2 The Bipolar-Flow Family Even though the astrophysical jet sources range through huge factors in {size, age, power, mass(CE)}, CE ::= central engine, viz. range through respective factors {108,107,109,109}, they appear astonishingly similar in their essential properties such as the jets’ opening angle Θ, the jet/core power ratio, maximal speed, morphology, stability, spectrum, and variability. They tend to be divided into ‘micro-quasars’ and ‘quasars’ – the prefix “micro” alluding to a typical discriminating factor of 106 in their listed properties – a classification which essentially agrees with ‘stellar’ and ‘galactic’ CEs. Here is a table of the complete family of Jet Sources, or Bipolar Flows (BFs): Newborn Stars (YSOs) Forming White Dwarfs (inside PNe) Elderly Binary Neutron Stars Centers of Galactic Disks (AGN) For an easier comparison of the subsequent modeling with the best-studied astronomical jet sources, let us look at a few outstanding representatives of the four classes: (a) Newborn stars, or young stellar objects (YSOs), tend to emit predominantly thermal spectra, hence they look often rather different from their more powerful and larger relatives of the BF family. Yet as already stressed in earlier publications, a few exceptions exist which look exactly like miniature copies of their larger relatives, e.g. like fast expanding radio triples, of age 103yr, see Blome & Kundt [1988], or Kundt [1996, 2001, 2002, 2005]. Surprising was last year’s discovery by Whelan et al [2009] of half a dozen brown dwarfs with jets: Even such YSOs, of subsolar mass, have strong enough magnetospheres in fast enough corotation to blow (feeble) jets, of lengths 1016.5cm. And yet newer are the properties of the massive protostellar jet HH 80-81 found by Carrasco-Gonzalez et al [2010] which highlights the similarity of the four classes. (b) Forming white dwarfs,insideplanetary nebulae (PNe), have various morphologies, but at least some of them show clear evidences of feeble jets near their symmetry axes, see [Kundt 1996], and indications of two antipodal elongated lobes, and their various morphologies cannot be understood without multiple plasma components of strongly differing densities in extended interaction. An increasing number of cataclysmic variables appear to join the jet set. (c)Thisclass,ofBFspoweredbyelderly neutron stars, is likewise known for more than 30 years, with SS 433 as its most powerful, and most exotic representative: SS 433 is particularly famous for its multiple, transrelativistic and almost periodic optical and X-ray emission lines – reminiscent of the broad emission lines of the quasars – which I understand as multiply excited recombination lines from dragged-along channel- wall material of the innermost parts of its precessing jets [Kundt 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005]. The channel-wall material may well stem from the wind of its (ordinary) stellar companion. Just recently, Pakull et al [2010] have discovered a 20 times older brother of its kind, ‘nebula’ S26in the outskirts of the Sculptor galaxy NGC 7793, which is similarly impressive even if somewhat fainter than SS 433. The authors may have overestimated its mechanical power by assuming that its lobes radiated preferentially (optically) from a skin-like radiative shock at their periphery, rather than from small-filling-factor filamentary inclusions, at about 103times higher densities, by 103times less matter, and therefore with 103times less mechanical power than stated. By taking care of a filling factor f ≈10−3 of the optical source in its lobes, the properties of S 26 conform nicely with those of all the other class-(c) sources. With the probable exception of our Galactic center, neutron stars are the only jet class with central engines which have shown (≥ eight cases of) emission of the 511 keV e±-pair annihilation line, redshifted by some 7% [Kaiser & Hannikainen 2002], an indication of significant local pair excess. There is also unredshifted emission of the 511 keV line from a vicinity of Felix Mirabel’s ‘great annihilator’ [1992]. Interesting, and still poorly understood are the frequently reported time-periodic motions of X-ray spectra of class-(c)-sources in the intensity-vs-hardness plane, and of their correlations with radio outbursts, and with flaring jet formation, on varying time scales between weeks and years, which take the shape of a repeatedly Black Holes Cannot Blow Jets 3 traversed turkey head,[K¨ording et al 2006]. They should eventually allow us to get a deeper insight into the quasi-periodic physical processes taking place near the jets’ CE. Similar quasi-periodicities take place in the AGN sources, though on distinctly longer time scales, and detected in different frequency ranges [K¨ording et al 2008]. (d) Many new discoveries have been made relating to those luminous ‘unresolved massive objects’ (UMOs) at the centers of massive galaxies often called ‘supermassive black holes’, or simply ‘active galactic nuclei’ (AGN), which may instead be the dense, nuclear-burning centers of their massive disks. Their best known representative is the source SgrA* at our own Galactic center, whose supposed BH nature has received another seven severe blows during the past four years. Serious doubts on its BH interpretation were already expressed in [Kundt 1990, 2001b], among others because of its strong wind, mapped in the Brackett α and γ lines, of −2.5 3 mass rate 10 M/yr, speed 10 km/s, which is seen to blow off tails from windzones of 8 stars within 1 lyr of SgrA*. These doubts were enhanced when a thin, lower-hemisphere jet was mapped with CHANDRA at X-rays by Baganoff et al [2003], between 0.5 and 1 pc from Sgr A*, and further when Aharonian et al [2004] detected SgrA* in emission at TeV energies, because the temperature of an accreting BH (of mass 1/4 M) is predicted to be below 1 keV(M/M) , controlled by the Eddington limit on its luminosity.