Energetics of star-disc encounters in the non-linear regime
Abstract
We investigate the response of a circumstellar accretion disc to the fly-by of a perturbing mass on a parabolic orbit. The energy and angular momentum transferred during the encounter are calculated using a reduced three-body method. In almost all close encounters the energy and angular momentum transfer is dominated by disc material becoming unbound from the system, with the contributions from close disc particle -- star encounters being significant. For more distant encounters with some prograde element to the motion the disc material loses energy and angular momentum to the perturber's orbit through a resonance feature. The magnitude of the energy transfer calculated in our simulations is greater than that of the binding energy of material exterior to periastron by a factor of two in the prograde case, and up to a factor of five in the case of the retrograde encounter. The destructive nature of the encounters indicates that a non-linear treatment is essential in all but the most distant encounters.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9510153,
title = {Energetics of star-disc encounters in the non-linear regime},
author = {S. M. Hall and C. J. Clarke and J. E. Pringle},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9510153},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
19 pages, uuencoded gzipped postscript. Accepted MNRAS. Contains no figures. The full version including all 18 figures is available at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/preprint/PrePrint.html