Accretion of Low Angular Momentum Material onto Black Holes: Radiation Properties of Axisymmetric MHD Flows

Abstract

Numerical simulations of MHD accretion flows in the vicinity of a supermasssive black hole provide important insights to the problem of why and how systems -- such as the Galactic Center -- are underluminous and variable. To access applicability of such flows to real objects, we examine the dynamical MHD studies with computations of the time dependent radiation spectra predicted by the simulations. We apply Monte Carlo methods to calculate spectra predicted by the time-dependent model of an axisymmetic MHD flow accreting onto a black hole presented by Proga and Begelman. Our calculations show that variability in an accretion flow is not always reflected in the corresponding spectra, at least not in all wavelengths. We find no one-to-one correspondence between the accretion state and the predicted spectrum