Images of magnetospheric reconnection-powered radiation around supermassive black holes

Understand

Accreting supermassive black holes can now be observed at the event-horizon scale at mm wavelengths.

• Current predictions for the image rely on hypotheses (fluid modeling, thermal electrons) which might not always hold in the vicinity of the black hole, so that a full kinetic treatment is in order.
• In this letter, we describe the first 3D global general-relativistic particle-in-cell simulation of a black-hole magnetosphere.
• The system displays a persistent equatorial current sheet.