The plunging region of a thin accretion disc around a Schwarzschild black hole

Journal article

A set of analytic solutions for the plunging region thermodynamics has been developed recently under the assumption that the fluid undergoes a gravity-dominated geodesic plunge into the black hole. We test this model against a dedicated 3D global general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulation of a thin accretion disc around a Schwarzschild black hole using the code athenak . Provided that we include the effects of non-adiabatic heating (plausibly from grid-scale magnetic dissipation), we find excellent agreement between the analytic model and the simulated quantities. These results are particularly important for existing and future electromagnetic black hole spin measurements, many of which do not include the plunging fluid in their emission modelling. This exclusion typically stems from the assumption of a zero-stress boundary condition at the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO), forcing all thermodynamic quantities to vanish. Instead, we find a non-zero drop in the angular momentum over the plunging region, which is consistent with both prior simulations and observations. We demonstrate that this stress is small enough for the dynamics of the fluid in the plunging region to be well-described by geodesic trajectories, yet large enough to cause measurable dissipation near to the ISCO – keeping thermodynamic quantities from vanishing. In the plunging region, constant -disc models are a physically inappropriate framework.

Authors: Rule, J; Mummery, A; Balbus, S; Stone, JM; Zhang, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Volume: 542
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 377-390
• Publication date: 2025-07-30
• Acceptance date: 2025-07-23
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1256
• EISSN: 1365-2966
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English
• Keywords: accretion, accretion discs; black hole physics