Related papers: Accretion disc viscosity: a limit on the anisotrop…
Hercules X-1 is a nearly edge-on X-ray binary with a warped, precessing accretion disk, which manifests through a 35-day cycle of alternating High and Low flux states. This disk precession introduces a changing line of sight towards the…
Enigmatic transitions between spin-up and spin-down have been observed in several X-ray pulsars accreting matter via an accretion disk. In these transitions, the torque changes sign but remains at nearly the same magnitude. It has been…
We investigate the aperiodic variability for a relatively large sample of accreting neutron stars and intermediate polars, focusing on the properties of the characteristic break commonly observed in power spectra of accreting objects. In…
Accretion discs are common in binary systems, and they are often found to be misaligned with respect to the binary orbit. The gravitational torque from a companion induces nodal precession in misaligned disc orbits. We calculate whether…
Accretion disc turbulence is investigated in the framework of the shearing box approximation. The turbulence is either driven by the magneto-rotational instability or, in the non-magnetic case, by an explicit and artificial forcing term in…
Rapid, large amplitude variability at optical to X-ray wavelengths is now seen in an increasing number of Seyfert galaxies and luminous quasars. The variations imply a global change in accretion power, but are too rapid to be communicated…
We have considered precession in accretion disks in which a second moment of inertia relative to an axis perpendicular to the axis of rotation may be very important. This formalism, that takes into account the precession contribution to the…
Accretion discs are present around both stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries and supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. A wide variety of circumstantial evidence implies that many of these discs are warped. The standard…
The radiation-driven warping instability discovered by Pringle holds considerable promise as the mechanism responsible for producing warped, precessing accretion disks in X-ray binaries. This instability is an inherently global mode of the…
The inner region of the accretion disk around a magnetized star (T Tauri star, white dwarf or neutron star) is subjected to magnetic torques that induce warping and precession of the disk. These torques arise from the interaction between…
Warped accretion discs are expected in many protostellar binary systems. In this paper, we study the long-term evolution of disc warp and precession for discs with dimensionless thickness $H/r$ larger than their viscosity parameter…
The inner region of the accretion disk onto a rotating magnetized central star (neutron star, white dwarf or T Tauri star) is subjected to magnetic torques which induce warping and precession of the disk. The origin of these torques lies in…
In low-mass disks, turbulent torques are probably the most important way of redistributing angular momentum. Here we present the theory of turbulent accretion disks. We show the molecular viscosity is far too small to account for the…
Accretion discs around black holes power some of the most luminous objects in the Universe. Discs that are misaligned to the black hole spin can become warped over time by Lense-Thirring precession. Recent work has shown that strongly…
Proto-planetary discs, the birth environment of planets, are an example of a structure commonly found in astrophysics, accretion discs. Identifying the mechanism responsible for accretion is a long-standing problem, dating back several…
Misaligned accretion disks surrounding rotating compact objects experience a torque due to the Lense-Thirring effect, which leads to precession of the inner disk. It has been suggested that this effect could be responsible for some low…
We excite an epicyclic motion, whose amplitude depends on the vertical position, $z$, in a simulation of a turbulent accretion disc. An epicyclic motion of this kind may be caused by a warping of the disc. By studying how the epicyclic…
Hercules X-1 is a nearly edge-on accreting X-ray pulsar with a warped accretion disk, precessing with a period of about 35 days. The disk precession allows for unique and changing sightlines towards the X-ray source. To investigate the…
We demonstrate that measurable vertical structure can be excited in the accretion disc of a close binary system by a dipolar magnetic field centred on the secondary star. We present the first high resolution hydrodynamic simulations to show…
The origin of hydrodynamic turbulence in rotating shear flow is a long standing puzzle. Resolving it is especially important in astrophysics when the flow angular momentum profile is Keplerian which forms an accretion disk having negligible…