Clumpy Outflows from Super-Eddington Accreting Black Holes. II. Conditions for Clump Formation

arXiv:2610.24660 · astro-ph.HE, astro-ph.GA · Submitted 2026-10-17 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.HE, astro-ph.GA

Submitted: 2026-10-17

Updated: 2026-10-17

Comments: submitted

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) commonly exhibit ultra-fast outflows (UFOs) with velocities of 0.03 -- 0.3 c.

Abstract

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) commonly exhibit ultra-fast outflows (UFOs) with velocities of 0.03 -- 0.3 c. Recent high-resolution X-ray observations with XRISM/Resolve suggest that UFOs may have a clumpy structure. However, the formation and evolution of these clumpy outflows remain poorly understood. In the first paper of this series, we investigated the formation of clumpy outflows using numerical simulations and find that sufficiently high spatial resolution is required to reproduce clumpy structures numerically. In this second paper, we perform a series of numerical experiments to identify the key physical processes governing clump formation. We find that spatial fluctuations of physical quantities at the disk surface are essential for the formation of clumpy outflows, whereas spatial and temporal fluctuations at the inner boundary have only a minor effect. Furthermore, density structure-function analysis suggests that the high-density regions have an elongated morphology with characteristic transverse widths of several tens of R g, possibly produced by radiation Rayleigh--Taylor instability. A more comprehensive investigation of the instability in general-relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations, where accretion disk structures emerge self-consistently, is expected to provide deeper insights into the physical origin of clumpy outflows.

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