We present general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic numerical simulations of the accretion flow around the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The simulations include for the first time radiative cooling processes (synchrotron, bremsstrahlung and inverse Compton) self‐consistently in the dynamics, allowing us to test the common simplification of ignoring all cooling losses in the modelling of Sgr A*. We confirm that for Sgr A*, neglecting the cooling losses is a reasonable approximation if the Galactic Centre is accreting below ∼10−8 M⊙ yr−1, i.e. Ṁ<10−7trueṀ Edd . However, above this limit, we show that radiative losses should be taken into account as significant differences appear in the dynamics and the resulting spectra when comparing simulations with and without cooling. This limit implies that most nearby low‐luminosity active galactic nuclei are in the regime where cooling should be taken into account. We further make a parameter study of axisymmetric gas accretion around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Centre. This approach allows us to investigate the physics of gas accretion in general, while confronting our results with the well‐studied and observed source, Sgr A*, as a test case. We confirm that the nature of the accretion flow and outflow is strongly dependent on the initial geometry of the magnetic field. For example, we find it difficult, even with very high spins, to generate powerful outflows from discs threaded with multiple, separate poloidal field loops.

We present a new way of describing the flares from Sgr A* with a self-consistent calculation of the particle distribution. All relevant radiative processes are taken into account in the evolution of the electron distribution and resulting spectrum. We present spectral modelling for new X-ray flares observed by NuSTAR, together with older observations in different wavelengths, and discuss the changes in plasma parameters to produce a flare.We show that under certain conditions, the real particle distribution can differ significantly from standard distributions assumed in most studies.We conclude that the flares are likely generated by magnetized plasma consistent with our understanding of the accretion flow. Including non-thermal acceleration, injection, escape, and cooling losses produces a spectrum with a break between the infrared and the X-ray, allowing a better simultaneous description of the different wavelengths. We favour the non-thermal synchrotron interpretation, assuming the infrared flare spectrum used is representative.We also consider the effects on Sgr A*s quiescent spectrum in the case of a density increase due to the G2 encounter with Sgr A*.

We present the first spectral energy distributions produced self-consistently by 2.5D general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamical (GRMHD) numerical simulations, where radiative cooling is included in the dynamical calculation. As a case study, we focus on the accretion flow around the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which has the best constrained physical parameters. We compare the simulated spectra to the observational data of Sgr A* and explore the parameter space of our model to determine the effect of changing the initial magnetic field configuration, ion to electron temperature ratio T i /T e and the target accretion rate. We find the best description of the data for a mass accretion rate of ∼ 10 −9 M ⊙ /yr, and rapid spin (0.7 < a * < 0.9). The submillimeter peak flux seems largely independent of initial conditions, while the higher energies can be very sensitive to the initial magnetic field configuration. Finally, we also discuss flaring features observed in some simulations, that may be due to artifacts of the 2D configuration.