Abstract
Clumps of ions and neutrals in the weakly ionized plasma in an accretion disk are shown to follow trajectories analogous to those of fictitious ‘metaparticles’ having a charge to mass ratio reduced from that of an ion by the ionization fraction. A certain class of meta-particles have zero-canonical angular momentum and so spiral in towards the star. Accumulation of these meta-particles establishes a radial electric field that drives the electric current that flows in bidirectional astrophysical jets lying along the disk axis and provides forces that drive the jets. The entire process converts gravitational potential energy into jet energy while absorbing angular momentum from accreting material and shedding this angular momentum at near infinite radius.
Highlights
This paper describes a model integrating the distinct physics of an accretion disk and bidirectional astrophysical jets as sketched in figure 1
The disk serves as a mass source for the jets and powers the jets via a conversion of gravitational potential energy into an electromotive force (EMF) that drives a current flowing in a circuit passing through both the disk and the jets
The radial electric field can be considered as the provider of the increasing amount of toroidal flux in the jets where this increase occurs because the jet length is continuously increasing
Summary
This paper describes a model integrating the distinct physics of an accretion disk and bidirectional astrophysical jets as sketched in figure 1. The jets and disk form two physically separated regions which are part of the same electrical circuit and part of the same global magnetic field system. Instead the jet acts as a conduit through which angular momentum is transported to near infinite radius in the disk plane where it is shed with negligible associated energy exhaust. The first part of this paper describes the jet region. An earlier version of this model containing quantitative estimates was provided in [1] and a more detailed version is given in [2]
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