How Dim Accreting Black Holes Could Be?
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Recent hydrodynamical simulations of radiatively inefficient black hole accretion flows with low viscosity have demonstrated that these flows differ significantly from those described by an advection-dominated model. The black hole flows are advection-dominated only in their inner parts, but convectively dominated at radii R>100R_g. In such flows, the radiative output comes mostly from the convection part, and the radiative efficiency is independent of accretion rate and equals ~0.001. This value gives a limit for how dim an accreting black hole could be. It agrees with recent Chandra observations which indicate that accreting black holes in low-mass X-ray binaries are by factor about 100 dimmer that neutron stars accreting with the same accretion rates.
4 pages, will appear in ApJ Letters
4 pages, will appear in ApJ Letters