Plasmoid-dominated magnetic reconnection is known to convert magnetic energy into heat and kinetic energy and is thought to be closely related to high-energy emission features originating near compact objects. We present preliminary results of high-resolution special-relativistic resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations of reconnecting 3D current sheets starting from a Harris equilibrium. We...
Magnetars produce the brightest detected outbursts in the X-ray and radio bands, offering unique opportunities to probe extreme plasma physics and exotic quantum electrodynamic processes. Magnetospheric reconnection is a suspected mechanism for generating bursts and giant flares. However, modeling the interplay between small-scale reconnection processes and the global structure of magnetar...
It has been proposed recently that Inverse Compton scattering of soft photons by pairs acceleration in reconnecting current sheets that form during MAD states, can be the source of the TeV emission detected in M87. In this talk I’ll argue that synchrotron emission by ions accelerated in the current sheet is expected to be the dominant source of the GeV emission observed. The analysis is...
Simulations of magnetized binary neutron star mergers often seed the interiors of the initial stars with unrealistically strong magnetic fields to overcome the suppression of small-scale turbulence by finite grid resolution and observe postmerger magnetic collimation and potential jet breakout. We present a curious numerical instability arising from low resolution (227 meters) and high initial...
Accreting supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs), which are the expected outcome of galaxy mergers, are potential powerful multimessenger sources of gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic (EM) radiation. The latter may be periodically modulated by an asymmetric density distribution in the circumbinary disk (CBD), typically referred to as the “lump”. Possible enhancement of this...
