Intrinsic electromagnetic variability in celestial objects containing rapidly spinning black holes

Abstract

Analytical studies have raised the concern that a mysterious expulsion of magnetic field lines by a rapidly-spinning black hole (dubbed the black hole Meissner effect) would shut down the Blandford-Znajek process and quench the jets of active galactic nuclei and microquasars. This effect is however not seen observationally or in numerical simulations. Previous attempts at reconciling the predictions with observations have proposed several mechanisms to evade the Meissner effect. In this paper, we identify a new evasion mechanism and discuss its observational significance. Specifically, we show that the breakdown of stationarity is sufficient to remove the expulsion of the magnetic field at all multipole orders, and that the associated temporal variation is likely turbulent due to the existence of efficient mechanisms for sharing energy across different modes. Such an intrinsic (as opposed to being driven externally by, e.g., changes in the accretion rate) variability of the electromagnetic field can produce the recorded linear correlation between microvariability amplitudes and mean fluxes, help create magnetic randomness and seed sheared magnetic loops in jets, and lead to a better theoretical fit to the X-ray microvariability power spectral density.