Polarized Emission of Sagittarius A*
by Huang, Lei and Liu, Siming and Shen, Zhi-Qiang and Yuan, Ye-Fei and Cai, Mike J. and Li, Hui and Fryer, Christopher L.
27 pages, 6 figures, ApJ accepted
We explore the parameter space of the two temperature pseudo-Newtonian Keplerian accretion flow model for the millimeter and shorter wavelength emission from Sagittarius A*. A general relativistic ray-tracing code is used to treat the radiative transfer of polarized synchrotron emission from the flow. The synchrotron self-Comptonization and bremsstrahlung emission components are also included. It is shown that the model can readily account for the millimeter to sub-millimeter emission characteristics with an accretion rate of ~6×10^17g.s^-1 and an inclination angle of ~40 deg. However, the corresponding model predicted near-infrared and X-ray fluxes are more than one order of magnitude lower than the observed ‘quiescent’ state values. While the extended quiescent-state X-ray emission has been attributed to thermal emission from the large-scale accretion flow, the NIR emission and flares are likely dominated by emission regions either within the last stable orbit of a Schwarzschild black hole or associated with outflows. With the viscous parameter derived from numerical simulations, there is still a degeneracy between the electron heating rate and the magnetic parameter. A fully general relativistic treatment with the black hole spin incorporated will resolve these issues.