3:30–4:30 pm ERC 161
Dimitrios Giannios (Purdue University) "The journey of relativistic astrophysical jets"
When black holes are fed gas by their environment, they convert gravitational energy into radiation extremely efficiently and, often, eject powerful collimated flows of plasma at a speed close to the speed of light, producing "relativistic jets". Relativistic jets are observed to emerge from super-massive black holes located at galactic centers but also believed to follow the merger of neutron stars powering gamma-ray bursts. The common hypothesis for the formation of jets is that they are launched by magnetic fields that thread the black hole and the surrounding gas. I will discuss the journey of the jet from its birth place (the black hole) to the much larger scales (the radiation phase). I argue that the jet radiation is result of instabilities in the jet that result in dissipation of energy through the process of magnetic reconnection; a process similar to the one that powers the solar flares. I will present my team's first-principle simulations showing how the magnetic reconnection in the jet plasma can potentially account for the jet flares. Finally, I will discuss what we can learn from the spectacular gravitational wave and electromagnetic detections of merging neutron stars.
