Accretion-modified Stars in Accretion Disks of Active Galactic Nuclei: Slowly Transient Appearance

Abstract

Abstract Compact objects are expected to exist in the accretion disks of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and in the presence of such a dense environment (∼1014 cm−3), they will form a new kind of stellar population denoted as accretion-modified stars (AMSs). This hypothesis is supported by recent LIGO/Virgo detection of the mergers of very high-mass stellar binary black holes (BHs). We show that the AMSs will be trapped by the SMBH disk within a typical AGN lifetime. In the context of SMBH disks, the rates of Bondi accretion onto BHs are ∼109 L Edd/c 2, where L Edd is the Eddington luminosity and c is the speed of light. Outflows developed from the hyper-Eddington accretion strongly impact the Bondi sphere and induce episodic accretion. We show that the hyper-Eddington accretion will be halted after an accretion interval of t a ∼ 105 m 1 s, where m 1 = m •/10M ⊙ is the BH mass. The kinetic energy of the outflows accumulated during t a is equivalent to 10 supernovae driving an explosion of the Bondi sphere and developing blast waves. We demonstrate that a synchrotron flare from relativistic electrons accelerated by the blast waves peaks in the soft X-ray band (∼0.1 keV), significantly contributing to the radio, optical, UV, and soft X-ray emission of typical radio-quiet quasars. External inverse Compton scattering of the electrons peaks around 40 GeV and is detectable through Fermi-LAT. The flare, decaying with t −6/5 with a few months, will appear as a slowly varying transient. The flares, occurring at a rate of a few per year in radio-quiet quasars, provide a new mechanism for explaining AGN variability.