Related papers: Going with the flow: using gas clouds to probe the…
When gas accretes onto a black hole, at a rate either much less than or much greater than the Eddington rate, it is likely to do so in an "adiabatic" or radiatively inefficient manner. Under fluid (as opposed to MHD) conditions, the disk…
The density profile of the ambient medium around a supermassive black hole plays an important role in understanding the inflow-outflow mechanisms in the Galactic Centre. We constrain the spherical density profile using the stellar bow shock…
The observed lifetimes of gaseous protoplanetary discs place strong constraints on gas and ice giant formation in the core accretion scenario. The approximately 10-Earth-mass solid core responsible for the attraction of the gaseous envelope…
Several arguments suggest that stochastic condensation of cold gas and its accretion onto the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) is essential for active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback to work in the most massive galaxies that lie at the…
We show that observations by Backer and collaborators over the past two decades constrain the time derivative of the proper motion of Sgr A* to be less than 0.14 mas yr^{-2}. Using this result and a preliminary measurement by Eckart and…
Supermassive black holes (BH) accrete gas from their surroundings and coalesce with companions during galaxy mergers, and both processes change the BH mass and spin. By means of high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies, either…
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…
Recent millimeter-VLBI observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) have, for the first time, directly probed distances comparable to the horizon scale of a black hole. This provides unprecedented access to the environment immediately around the…
The origin of the supermassive black holes that power the most distant quasars observed is largely unknown. One hypothesis is that they grew rapidly from intermediate-mass seeds (~100 M_sun) left by the first stars. However, some previous…
In recent past, the progresses in accretion studies onto relativistically gravitating central objects like a Schwarzschild singularity reveal that the accretion flow must be transonic. For such cases, the radial inward speed gradient can be…
A solid theoretical understanding of how inflowing, accreting plasma around black holes and other compact objects gives rise to outflowing winds and jets is still lacking, despite decades of observations. The fact that similar processes and…
Viscous rotating accretion flows around black holes become advection-dominated when the accretion rate $\dot M$ is sufficiently low. Most of the accretion energy in such flows is stored within the gas and advected radially inward. The…
Using cosmological simulations with a dynamic range in excess of 10 million, we study the transport of gas mass and angular momentum through the circumnuclear region of a disk galaxy containing a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The…
A clear understanding of the chemical processing of matter, as it is transferred from a molecular cloud to a planetary system, depends heavily on knowledge of the physical conditions endured by gas and dust as these accrete onto a disk and…
Observations of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way with the Event Horizon Telescope at 1.3 mm have revealed a size of the emitting region that is smaller than the size of the black-hole shadow. This can be reconciled with the…
We present results of recent observations and theoretical modeling of data from black holes accreting at very low luminosities (L/L_Edd ~ 10^{-8}). We discuss our newly developed time-dependent model for episodic ejection of relativistic…
Accretion flows around black holes generally result in mass-outflows that exhibit irregular behavior quite often. Using 2D time-dependent hydrodynamical calculations, we show that the mass-outflow is unstable in the cases of thick accretion…
The central super-massive black hole of the Milky Way, Sgr A*, accretes at a very low rate making it a very underluminous galactic nucleus. Despite the tens of Wolf-Rayet stars present within the inner parsec supplying ${\sim}10^{-3}\rm\…
Discovery of high-redshift (z > 6) supermassive black holes (BHs) may indicate that the rapid (or super-Eddington) gas accretion has aided their quick growth. Here, we study such rapid accretion of the primordial gas on to intermediate-mass…
The phenomenon by which matter accumulates in the vicinity of a huge celestial object is known as accretion. The gravitational energy is excreted as a consequence of infalling matter onto compact objects. The accretion procedure around…