Magnetic reconnection: flares and coronal heating in Active Galactic Nuclei
arXiv:astro-ph/9805347 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.1998.01950.x
Abstract
A magnetically-structured accretion disk corona, generated by buoyancy instability in the disk, can account for observations of flare--like events in Active Galactic Nuclei. We examine how Petschek magnetic reconnection, associated with MHD turbulence, can result in a violent release of energy and heat the magnetically closed regions of the corona up to canonical X-ray emitting temperatures. X-ray magnetic flares, the after effect of the energy released in slow shocks, can account for the bulk of the X-ray luminosity from Seyfert galaxies and consistently explain the observed short-timescale variability.
revised version, 6 pages, 1 figures in MNRAS LaTex style