Full list of authors: Akiyama, Kazunori; Algaba, Juan Carlos; Alberdi, Antxon; Alef, Walter; Anantua, Richard; Asada, Keiichi; Azulay, Rebecca; Baczko, Anne-Kathrin; Ball, David; Balokovic, Mislav; Barrett, John; Benson, Bradford A.; Bintley, Dan; Blackburn, Lindy; Blundell, Raymond; Boland, Wilfred; Bouman, Katherine L.; Bower, Geoffrey C.; Boyce, Hope Bremer, Michael; Brinkerink, Christiaan D.; Brissenden, Roger; Britzen, Silke; Broderick, Avery E.; Broguiere, Dominique; Bronzwaer, Thomas; Byun, Do-Young; Carlstrom, John E.; Chael, Andrew; Chan, Chi-kwan; Chatterjee, Shami; Chatterjee, Koushik; Chen, Ming-Tang; Chen, Yongjun; Chesler, Paul M.; Cho, Ilje; Christian, Pierre; Conway, John E.; Cordes, James M.; Crawford, Thomas M.; Crew, Geoffrey B.; Cruz-Osorio, Alejandro; Cui, Yuzhu; Davelaar, Jordy; De Laurentis, Mariafelicia; Deane, Roger; Dempsey, Jessica; Desvignes, Gregory; Dexter, Jason; Doeleman, Sheperd S.; Eatough, Ralph P.; Falcke, Heino; Farah, Joseph; Fish, Vincent L.; Fomalont, Ed; Ford, H. Alyson; Fraga-Encinas, Raquel; Friberg, Per; Fromm, Christian M.; Fuentes, Antonio; Galison, Peter; Gammie, Charles F.; Garcia, Roberto; Gelles, Zachary; Gentaz, Olivier; Georgiev, Boris; Goddi, Ciriaco; Gold, Roman; Gomez, Jose L.; Gomez-Ruiz, Arturo I.; Gu, Minfeng; Gurwell, Mark; Hada, Kazuhiro; Haggard, Daryl; Hecht, Michael H.; Hesper, Ronald; Himwich, Elizabeth; Ho, Luis C.; Ho, Paul; Honma, Mareki; Huang, Chih-Wei L.; Huang, Lei; Hughes, David H.; Ikeda, Shiro; Inoue, Makoto; Issaoun, Sara; James, David J.; Jannuzi, Buell T.; Janssen, Michael; Jeter, Britton; Jiang, Wu; Jimenez-Rosales, Alejandra; Johnson, Michael D.; Jorstad, Svetlana; Jung, Taehyun; Karami, Mansour; Karuppusamy, Ramesh; Kawashima, Tomohisa; Keating, Garrett K.; Kettenis, Mark; Kim, Dong-Jin; Kim, Jae-Young; Kim, Jongsoo; Kim, Junhan; Kino, Motoki; Koay, Jun Yi; Kofuji, Yutaro; Koch, Patrick M.; Koyama, Shoko; Kramer, Michael; Kramer, Carsten; Krichbaum, Thomas P.; Kuo, Cheng-Yu; Lauer, Tod R.; Lee, Sang-Sung; Levis, Aviad; Li, Yan-Rong; Li, Zhiyuan; Lindqvist, Michael; Lico, Rocco; Lindahl, Greg; Liu, Jun; Liu, Kuo; Liuzzo, Elisabetta; Lo, Wen-Ping; Lobanov, Andrei P.; Loinard, Laurent; Lonsdale, Colin; Lu, Ru-Sen; MacDonald, Nicholas R.; Mao, Jirong; Marchili, Nicola; Markoff, Sera; Marrone, Daniel P.; Marscher, Alan P.; Marti-Vidal, Ivan; Matsushita, Satoki; Matthews, Lynn D.; Medeiros, Lia; Menten, Karl M.; Mizuno, Izumi; Mizuno, Yosuke; Moran, James M.; Moriyama, Kotaro; Moscibrodzka, Monika; Muller, Cornelia; Musoke, Gibwa; Mus Mejias, Alejandro; Michalik, Daniel; Nadolski, Andrew; Nagai, Hiroshi; Nagar, Neil M.; Nakamura, Masanori; Narayan, Ramesh; Narayanan, Gopal; Natarajan, Iniyan; Nathanail, Antonios; Neilsen, Joey; Neri, Roberto; Ni, Chunchong; Noutsos, Aristeidis; Nowak, Michael A.; Okino, Hiroki; Olivares, Hector; Ortiz-Leon, Gisela N.; Oyama, Tomoaki; Ozel, Feryal; Palumbo, Daniel C. M.; Park, Jongho; Patel, Nimesh; Pen, Ue-Li; Pesce, Dominic W.; Pietu, Vincent; Plambeck, Richard; PopStefanija, Aleksandar; Porth, Oliver; Potzl, Felix M.; Prather, Ben; Preciado-Lopez, Jorge A.; Psaltis, Dimitrios; Pu, Hung-Yi; Ramakrishnan, Venkatessh; Rao, Ramprasad; Rawlings, Mark G.; Raymond, Alexander W.; Rezzolla, Luciano; Ricarte, Angelo; Ripperda, Bart; Roelofs, Freek; Rogers, Alan; Ros, Eduardo; Rose, Mel; Roshanineshat, Arash; Rottmann, Helge; Roy, Alan L.; Ruszczyk, Chet; Rygl, Kazi L. J.; Sanchez, Salvador; Sanchez-Arguelles, David; Sasada, Mahito; Savolainen, Tuomas; Schloerb, F. Peter; Schuster, Karl-Friedrich; Shao, Lijing; Shen, Zhiqiang; Small, Des; Sohn, Bong Won; SooHoo, Jason; Sun, He; Tazaki, Fumie; Tetarenko, Alexandra J.; Tiede, Paul; Tilanus, Remo P. J.; Titus, Michael; Toma, Kenji; Torne, Pablo; Trent, Tyler; Traianou, Efthalia; Trippe, Sascha; van Bemmel, Ilse; van Langevelde, Huib Jan; van Rossum, Daniel R.; Wagner, Jan; Ward-Thompson, Derek; Wardle, John; Weintroub, Jonathan; Wex, Norbert; Wharton, Robert; Wielgus, Maciek; Wong, George N.; Wu, Qingwen; Yoon, Doosoo; Young, Andre; Young, Ken; Younsi, Ziri; Yuan, Feng; Yuan, Ye-Fei; Zensus, J. Anton; Zhao, Guang-Yao; Zhao, Shan-Shan; Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.-- This is an open access article, original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

/pdf/first-m87-event-horizon-telescope-results-viii-magnetic-1enz32zw8n.pdf

First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. VIII. Magnetic Field Structure near the Event Horizon

Near a black hole, differential rotation of a magnetized accretion disk is thought to produce an instability that amplifies weak magnetic fields, driving accretion and outflow. These magnetic fields would naturally give rise to the observed synchrotron emission in galaxy cores and to the formation of relativistic jets, but no observations to date have been able to resolve the expected horizon-scale magnetic-field structure. We report interferometric observations at 1.3-millimeter wavelength that spatially resolve the linearly polarized emission from the Galactic Center supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. We have found evidence for partially ordered magnetic fields near the event horizon, on scales of ~6 Schwarzschild radii, and we have detected and localized the intrahour variability associated with these fields.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/350/6265/1242.full.pdf

Resolved magnetic-field structure and variability near the event horizon of Sagittarius A*

Ray tracing radiative transfer is a powerful method for comparing theoretical models of black hole accretion flows and jets with observations. We present a public code, grtrans, for carrying out such calculations in the Kerr metric, including the full treatment of polarised radiative transfer and parallel transport along geodesics. The code is written in Fortran 90 and efficiently parallelises with OpenMP, and the full code and several components have Python interfaces. We describe several tests which are used for verifiying the code, and we compare the results for polarised thin accretion disc and semi-analytic jet problems with those from the literature as examples of its use. Along the way, we provide accurate fitting functions for polarised synchrotron emission and transfer coefficients from thermal and power law distribution functions, and compare results from numerical integration and quadrature solutions of the polarised radiative transfer equations. We also show that all transfer coefficients can play an important role in predicted images and polarisation maps of the Galactic center black hole, Sgr A*, at submillimetre wavelengths.

A public code for general relativistic, polarised radiative transfer around spinning black holes

The physical processes which are currently thought to give rise to the observed characteristics of these objects are reviewed. The large-scale structure clearly demands a need for an in situ resupply of energy to the relativistic particle population, and in addition strongly suggests that the large-scale flow is non-relativistic. Examination of the data for compact sources indicates that relativistic motion may explain the observations, but that severe difficulties arise when such flows are coupled to the large-scale structure. Finally, various aspects of the poorly understood nuclear engine are reviewed.

The Physics of Extragalactic Radio Sources

In recent years, our understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) prompt
emission has been revolutionized, due to a combination of new
instruments, new analysis methods, and novel ideas In this review, I
describe the most recent observational results and current
theoretical interpretation Observationally, a major development is
the rise of time resolved spectral analysis These led to (I)
identification of a distinguished high energy component, with GeV
photons often seen at a delay and (II) firm evidence for the
existence of a photospheric (thermal) component in a large number of
bursts These results triggered many theoretical efforts aimed at
understanding the physical conditions in the inner jet regions 
I highlight some areas of active theoretical
research These include (I) understanding the role played by magnetic
fields in shaping the dynamics of GRB outflow and spectra; (II)
understanding the microphysics of kinetic and magnetic energy
transfer, namely, accelerating particle to high energies in both shock
waves and magnetic reconnection layers; (III) understanding how
subphotospheric energy dissipation broadens the “Planck” spectrum;
and (IV) geometrical light aberration effects I highlight some of
these efforts and point towards gaps that still exist in our
knowledge as well as promising directions for the future

/pdf/physics-of-gamma-ray-bursts-prompt-emission-1voyq5bv8p.pdf

Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts Prompt Emission

The emission, absorption, polarization, and birefringent properties of a magnetized, relativistic, Maxwellian electron plasma are oomputed. The Maxwellian synchrotron source is notable for the near absence of Faraday rotation and polarization conversion. When opaque, the emission from a Maxwellian synchrotron source is Planckian, and hence unpolarized. The first-order self-Compton spectrum includes a high-frequency tail which extends well beyond the nominal cutoff frequency. The self-Compton spectral flux is simply related to the source Compton optical depth, and it is argued that only at ..gamma..-ray energies would the second-order self-Compton emission be significant for realistic particle distributions and typical source parameters. To illustrate the basic properties of Maxwellian sources, a uniform, isothermal Maxwellian source model has been fitted to the radio and X-ray spectrum of 3C 273.

T. W. Jones

Papers

Maxwellian synchrotron sources