General relativistic radiation hydrodynamics of accretion flows – II. Treating stiff source terms and exploring physical limitations

We present the implementation of an implicit–explicit (IMEX) Runge–Kutta numerical scheme for general relativistic (GR) hydrodynamics coupled to an optically thick radiation field in two existing GR-(magneto)hydrodynamics codes. We argue that the necessity of such an improvement arises naturally in most astrophysically relevant regimes where the optical thickness is high as the equations become stiff. By performing several simple 1D tests, we verify the codes’ new ability to deal with this stiffness and show consistency. Then, still in one spatial dimension, we compute a luminosity versus accretion rate diagram for the set-up of spherical accretion on to a Schwarzschild black hole and find good agreement with previous work which included more radiation processes than we currently have available. Lastly, we revisit the supersonic Bondi–Hoyle–Lyttleton (BHL) accretion in two dimensions where we can now present simulations of realistic temperatures, down to T ∼ 10⁶ K or less. Here we find that radiation pressure plays an important role, but also that these highly dynamical set-ups push our approximate treatment towards the limit of physical applicability. The main features of radiation hydrodynamics BHL flows manifest as (i) an effective adiabatic index approaching γeff ∼ 4/3; (ii) accretion rates two orders of magnitude lower than without radiation pressure, but still super-Eddington; (iii) luminosity estimates around the Eddington limit, hence with an overall radiative efficiency as small as $\eta _{\cal BHL} \sim \ 10^{-2}$; (iv) strong departures from thermal equilibrium in shocked regions; (v) no appearance of the flip-flop instability. We conclude that the current optically thick approximation to the radiation transfer does give physically substantial improvements over the pure hydro also in set-ups departing from equilibrium, and, once accompanied by an optically thin treatment, is likely to provide a fundamental tool for investigating accretion flows in a large variety of astrophysical systems.