Oral Presentation

Modeling M87 with Relativistic Radiation MHD

Author(s): Benjamin Ryan (UIUC), Sean Ressler (Berkeley), Joshua Dolence (LANL), Sasha Tchekhovskoy (Berkeley), Eliot Quataert (Berkeley), Charles Gammie (UIUC)

Presenter: Benjamin Ryan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

The M87 accretion flow is governed by relativistic gravity, collisionless magnetized turbulence, and, possibly, radiation interactions. We have combined our relativistic full transport radiation MHD code, bhlight, with a scheme for dissipation in collisionless plasmas. With this extended scheme we can to a good degree of physical completeness construct dynamical models of accretion flows onto spinning black holes below thin disk accretion rates. Here, we specialize to M87. We present synthetic imaging and spectra, and interpret M87 in terms of these models.