Tearing up the disc: misaligned accretion on to a binary
Abstract
In a recent paper we have shown that the evolution of a misaligned disc around a spinning black hole can result in tearing the disc into many distinct planes. Tearing discs with random orientations produce direct dynamical accretion on to the hole in approximately 70% of all cases. Here we examine the evolution of a misaligned disc around a binary system. We show that these discs are susceptible to tearing for almost all inclinations. We also show that tearing of the disc can result in a significant acceleration of the disc evolution and subsequent accretion on to the binary - by factors up to 10,000 times that of a coplanar prograde disc with otherwise identical parameters. This provides a promising mechanism for driving mergers of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries on timescales much shorter than a Hubble time. Disc tearing also suggests new observational signatures of accreting SMBH binaries, and other systems such as protostellar binaries.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1307.0010,
title = {Tearing up the disc: misaligned accretion on to a binary},
author = {Chris Nixon and Andrew King and Daniel Price},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.0010},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
9 pages, 7 figures. Accepted to MNRAS. Simulation movies are available here: http://jila.colorado.edu/chrisnixon/tearing_binary.html