Related papers: Beer Mats make bad Frisbees
The water bottle flipping challenge consists of spinning a bottle, partially filled with water, and making it land upright. It is quite a striking phenomenon, since at first sight it appears rather improbable that a tall rotating bottle…
Recent interest in the old problem of the motion of a coin spinning on a tabletop has focused on mechanisms of dissipation of energy as the angle alpha of the coin to the table decreases, while the angular velocity Omega of the point of…
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…
A sudden vertical impact on the mouth of a beer bottle generates a compression wave that propagates through the glass towards the bottom. When this wave reaches the base of the bottle, it is transmitted to the liquid as an expansion wave…
Astrophysical discs are often warped, that is, their orbital planes change with radius. This occurs whenever there is a non-axisymmetric force acting on the disc, for example the Lense-Thirring precession induced by a misaligned spinning…
The interaction of a massive binary and a non-self-gravitating circumbinary accretion disc is considered. The shape of the stationary twisted disc produced by the binary is calculated. It is shown that the inner part of the disc must lie in…
When matter orbits around a central mass obliquely with respect to the mass's spin axis, the Lense-Thirring effect causes it to precess at a rate declining sharply with radius. Ever since the work of Bardeen & Petterson (1975), it has been…
Mir Abbas Jalali et al. [Phys. Rev. E 92, 032913(2015)] explained the retrograde turn of rings by aerodynamic phenomena due to the presence of a central hole in the ring as opposed to a disk. The results of our experiments suggest that the…
A large body of theoretical and computational work shows that jets - modelled as magnetized disk winds - exert an external torque on their underlying disks that can efficiently remove angular momentum and act as major drivers of disk…
We analyse the classical problem of the stability of bicycles when moving quickly and upright. Developing a lean causes the front wheel to turn thereby setting the bicycle instantaneously into circular motion. The centripetal force…
We propose a complete theoretical description of the tennis racket effect, which occurs in the free rotation of a three-dimensional rigid body. This effect is characterized by a flip ($\pi$- rotation) of the head of the racket when a full…
The water bottle flip experiment is a recreational, non-conventional illustration of the conservation of angular moment. When a bottle partially filled with water is thrown in a rotational motion, water redistributes throughout the bottle,…
Magnetorotational turbulence and magnetically driven disc winds are often considered as separate processes. However, realistic astrophysical discs are expected to be subject to both effects, although possibly at different times and…
The spin-down of Be stars due to angular momentum transport from star to disc has been considered. This has been prompted by empirical studies of observed optical and IR line profile studies indicating that the disc is rotating in a…
The motion of a rigid, spinning disk on a flat surface ends with a dissipation-induced finite-time singularity. The problem of finding the dominant energy absorption mechanism during the last phase of the motion generated a lively debate…
We perform SPH simulations to study precession and changes in alignment between the circumprimary disc and the binary orbit in misaligned binary systems. We find that the precession process can be described by the rigid-disc approximation,…
The rolling motion of a rigid cylinder on an inclined flat viscous surface is investigated and the nonlinear resistance force against rolling, $F_R(v)$, is derived. For small velocities $F_R(v)$ increases with velocity due to increasing…
We consider the dynamics of a protostellar disc in a binary system where the disc is misaligned with the orbital plane of the binary, with the aim of determining the observational consequences for such systems. The disc wobbles with a…
Recent (sub)millimeter polarization observations of protoplanetary disks reveal toroidally aligned, effectively prolate dust grains large enough (at least ~100 $\mu$m) to efficiently scatter millimeter light. The alignment mechanism for…
Paper strips, e.g. confetti, descending to the floor begin to rotate around the horizontal axis after a short time. This slows down the vertical velocity compared to free fall and adds a horizontal velocity component. The frequency of…