Speaker
Lorenzo Sironi
Description
We argue that magnetic reconnection—a process by which opposite field lines annihilate, releasing their energy to the plasma—plays a major role for dissipation of the available free energy in black hole magnetospheres. Inverse Compton scattering within the chain of magnetic islands / flux ropes self-consistently created by reconnection in black hole magnetospheres can power the mysterious hard X-ray “coronal” emission of X-ray binaries, and generate GeV-to-TeV flares in M87. We will also argue that reconnection-driven hadronic acceleration in the coronal regions of active Seyfert galaxies may be the source of the TeV neutrinos detected by IceCube.
