Related papers: Irradiated Disks May Settle into Staircases
When the accretion rate is more than a small fraction of Eddington, the inner regions of accretion disks around black holes are expected to be radiation-dominated. However, in the alpha-model, these regions are also expected to be thermally…
Gravitational instabilities (GIs) are spiral distortions in a self-gravitating disk that appear wherever the local surface density and temperature become favorable for their growth. The restructuring of the disk as it becomes unstable, the…
Double diffusive staircases are investigated experimentally in a fluid layer with a stabilizing temperature gradient and a destabilizing gradient of ion concentration. Gradients of temperature and ion concentration are maintained in a…
As the earliest stage of planet formation, massive, optically thick, and gas rich protoplanetary disks provide key insights into the physics of star and planet formation. When viewed edge-on, high resolution images offer a unique…
Molecular gas disks are generally Toomre stable ($Q_T>$1) and yet clearly gravitationally unstable to structure formation as evidenced by the existence of molecular clouds and ongoing star formation. This paper adopts a 3D perspective to…
Two dimensional hydrodynamical disks are nonlinearly unstable to the formation of vortices. Once formed, these vortices essentially survive forever. What happens in three dimensions? We show with pseudospectral simulations that in 3D a…
We analytically calculate the marginally stable surface density profile for rotational instability of protoplanetary disks. The derived profile can be utilized for considering the region in a rotating disk where radial pressure gradient…
We investigate the structure of accretion disks around massive protostar applying steady state models of thin disks. The thin disk equations are solved with proper opacities for dust and gas taking into account the huge temperature…
[Abridged] Star and planet formation are the complex outcomes of gravitational collapse and angular momentum transport mediated by protostellar and protoplanetary disks. In this review we focus on the role of gravitational instability in…
We analyze how the process of dust settling affects the spectral energy distribution and optical appearance of protoplanetary disks. Using simple analytic estimates on the one hand, and detailed 1+1-D models on the other hand, we show that,…
We investigate the nonlinear growth stages of bending instability in stellar disks with exponential radial density profiles.We found that the unstable modes are global (the wavelengths are larger than the disk scale lengths) and that the…
By studying three-dimensional, radiative, global simulations of sub-Eddington, geometrically thin black hole accretion flows we show that thin disks which are dominated by magnetic pressure are stable against thermal instability. Such disks…
Many astrophysical systems of interest, including protoplanetary accretion disks, are made of turbu- lent magnetized gas with near solar metallicity. Thermal ionization of alkali metals in such gas exceeds non-thermal ionization when…
Low mass, self-gravitating accretion disks admit quasi-steady,`gravito-turbulent' states in which cooling balances turbulent viscous heating. However, numerical simulations show that gravito-turbulence cannot be sustained beyond dynamical…
Thermally bistable fluid tends to self-organize into clouds of hot and cold material, which are internally uniform and separated by thin conduction fronts. The evolution of these clouds has been studied for isobaric systems, but when…
Local thermal instability can plausibly explain the formation of multiphase gas in many different astrophysical environments, but the theory is only well understood in the optically thin limit of the equations of radiation hydrodynamics…
An instability can potentially operate in highly irradiated disks where the disk sharply transitions from being radially transparent to opaque (the 'transition region'). Such conditions may exist at the inner edges of transitional disks…
We investigate the thermal stability of optically thin, two-temperature, radiative cooling-dominated accretion disks. Our linear analysis shows that the disk is thermally unstable without magnetic fields, which agrees with previous…
While uniform temperature has no effect on equilibrium properties of hard-core systems, its gradient might substantially change their behaviour. In particular, in hard-disk system subject to temperature difference $\Delta T$ disks are…
Hydrodynamical instabilities in disks around young stars depend on the thermodynamic stratification of the disk and on the local rate of thermal relaxation. Here, we map the spatial extent of unstable regions for the Vertical Shear…