Related papers: Tearing up a misaligned accretion disc with a bina…
A geometrically thin, optically thick, warped accretion disk with a central source of luminosity is subject to non-axisymmetric forces due to radiation pressure; the resulting torque acts to modify the warp. In a recent paper, \cite{pri96}…
We numerically study the tidal instability of accretion discs in close binary systems using a two-dimensional SPH code. We find that the precession rate of tidally unstable, eccentric discs does not only depend upon the binary mass ratio q.…
Counter-rotating discs can arise from the accretion of a counter-rotating gas cloud onto the surface of an existing co-rotating disc or from the counter-rotating gas moving radially inward to the outer edge of an existing disc. At the…
Compact binaries have long been a paradigm for accretion theory. Much of our present view of how accretion occurs comes directly from the comparison of theory with observations of these sources. Since theory differs little for other objects…
We present an analytical and numerical study of a system composed of a stellar binary pair and a massless, locally isothermal viscous accretion disk that is coplanar to the binary orbital plane. Analytically, we study the effect of the…
We present a two-dimensional grid-based hydrodynamic simulation of a thin, viscous, locally-isothermal corotating disk orbiting an equal-mass Newtonian binary point mass on a fixed circular orbit. We study the structure of the disk after…
Tilted accretion disks in the magnetically arrested (MAD) state may be present in X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei such as Sgr A* and M87. We have carried out 3D global GRMHD simulations to study the evolution of these accretion…
Accretion discs are composed of ionized gas in motion around a central object. Sometimes, the disc is the source of powerful bipolar jets along its rotation axis. Theoretical models invoke the existence of a bipolar magnetic field crossing…
Recent observations have shown that circumbinary discs can be misaligned with respect to the binary orbital plane.The lack of spherical symmetry, together with the non-planar geometry of these systems, causes differential precession which…
We show that the distribution of observed accretion rates is a powerful diagnostic of protoplanetary disc physics. Accretion due to turbulent ("viscous") transport of angular momentum results in a fundamentally different distribution of…
We now have several observational examples of misaligned broken protoplanetary discs, where the disc inner regions are strongly misaligned with respect to the outer disc. Current models suggest that this disc structure can be generated with…
Most astrophysical accretion disks are likely to be warped. In X-ray binaries the spin evolution of an accreting neutron star is critically dependent on the interaction between the neutron star magnetic field and the accretion disk. There…
A thin viscous accretion disc around a Kerr black hole, which is warped due to the Lense-Thirring (LT) effect, was shown to cause the spin axis of the black hole to precess and align with the outer disc. We calculate the total LT torque…
The attracting properties of gravity enable matter present in cores to collapse into stars with seven orders of magnitude change in space and time making modelling of star formation a challenging multi-scale process. To circumvent this…
The orbits of binary stars precess as a result of general relativistic effects, forces arising from the asphericity of the stars, and forces from additional stars or planets in the system. For most binaries, the theoretical and observed…
We discuss the timescales for alignment of black hole and accretion disc spins in the context of binary systems. We show that for black holes that are formed with substantial angular momentum, the alignment timescales are likely to be at…
X-rays trace accretion onto compact objects in binaries with low mass companions at rates ranging up to near Eddington. Accretion at high rates onto neutron stars goes through cycles with time-scales of days to months. At lower average…
With three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations we show that the size of the decretion disc and the structure of the accretion flow onto the neutron star in a Be/X-ray binary strongly depends upon the disc aspect ratio, $H/R$. We simulate…
We present a suite of high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of binaries immersed in circumbinary accretion disks (CBDs). For the first time, we investigate the preferential accretion rate as a function of both eccentricity $e_{\rm b}$…
Newtonian simulations have demonstrated that accretion onto binary black holes produces accretion disks around each black hole ("minidisks"), fed by gas streams flowing through the circumbinary cavity from the surrounding circumbinary disk.…