English

Rossby Vortices in Thin Magnetized Accretion Discs

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2018-08-29 v2

Abstract

We study the Rossby wave instability (RWI) in a thin accretion disc threaded by an initially toroidal magnetic field using the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) code PLUTO. We find that for plasma 101<β<10310^1 < \beta < 10^3 , the growth rate and late-time density are suppressed, whereas for plasma β>103\beta > 10^3, the magnetic field has negligible effect. The initially toroidal field is twisted inside the vortex and expelled at late times. This creates a radially directed field outside the vortex region, which can be understood via a simple kinematic model of a magnetic field in a rotating fluid and may be observable via polarised dust emission.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.08849,
  title  = {Rossby Vortices in Thin Magnetized Accretion Discs},
  author = {Loren Matilsky and Sergei Dyda and Richard V. E. Lovelace and Patrick Lii},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.08849},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

10 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:55:33.935Z