Related papers: Constraints on AGN accretion disc viscosity derive…
Observations of warped discs can give insight into the nature of angular momentum transport in accretion discs. Only a few objects are known to show strong periodicity on long timescales, but when such periodicity is present it is often…
It is generally thought that AGN optical variability is produced, at least in part, by reprocessing of central X-rays by a surrounding accretion disc, resulting in wavelength-dependent lags between bands. Any good model of AGN optical…
We extend the model of King et al. (2004) for variability in black hole accretion discs, by taking proper account of the thermal properties of the disc. Because the degree of variability in the King et al. (2004) model depends sensitively…
Radiation emitted from an accretion disk around a massive black hole is a widely discussed model for the UV/soft X-ray excess emission observed in the spectra of many AGN. A self-consistent calculation of the structure and the emerging…
Observations of accreting systems often show significant variability (10-20 percent of accretion luminosity) on timescales much longer than expected for the disc regions releasing most of the luminosity. We propose an explicit physical…
Stellar-mass compact objects (COs) embedded in active galactic nucleus (AGN) discs are commonly assumed to accrete via Bondi or Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton (BHL) prescriptions, neglecting gas angular momentum. We show that differential rotation…
The soft excess seen in many AGN is most probably due to partially ionized material moving at relativistic speeds close to the black hole. There are currently two potential geometries for this material, one where it is out of the line of…
The characteristic timescale at which the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) turns from red noise to white noise can probe the accretion physics around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). A number of works have studied the…
[Abbreviated] We search for scaling relations between the fundamental AGN parameters and rest-frame UV/optical variability properties for a sample of $\sim$90 X-ray selected AGNs covering a wide redshift range from the XMM-COSMOS survey,…
We study the X-ray variability properties of distant AGNs in the Chandra Deep Field-South region over 17 years, up to $z\sim 4$, and compare them with those predicted by models based on local samples. We use the results of Monte Carlo…
Physical mechanism responsible for high viscosity in accretion disks is still under debate. Parameterization of the viscous stress as $\alpha P$ proved to be a successful representation of this mechanism in the outer parts of the disk,…
During the final growth phase of giant planets, accretion is thought to be controlled by a surrounding circumplanetary disk. Current astrophysical accretion disk models rely on hydromagnetic turbulence or gravitoturbulence as the source of…
Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) have long been observed to "twinkle" (i.e., their brightness varies with time) on timescales from days to years in the UV/optical bands. Such AGN UV/optical variability is essential for probing the physics of…
We propose that relative variability on short time-scales of the multiple images of a lensed quasar, after removal of the time delay, may be caused by hot spots or other moving structures in the accretion disk crossing microlens caustics…
We perform 3D radiation hydrodynamic local shearing box simulations to study the outcome of gravitational instability (GI) in optically thick Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) accretion disks. GI develops when the Toomre parameter QT \leq 1, and…
The nature of the viscosity operative in hot, two-temperature accretion disks around AGN has been a long-standing, unsolved problem. It has been previously suggested that protons, in conjunction with the turbulent magnetic field that is…
Accretion disks in AGN should be subject to the same type of instability as in cataclysmic variables (CVs) or in low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), which leads to dwarf nova and soft X-ray transient outbursts. It has been suggested that this…
We construct time-dependent models of accretion discs around black holes and neutron stars. We investigate the effect of evaporating the disc inner regions during quiescence on the predictions of the Disc Instability Model (DIM) for these…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) have been observed to vary stochastically with 10-20 rms amplitudes over a range of optical wavelengths where the emission arises in an accretion disk. Since the accretion disk is unlikely to vary coherently,…
The truncation of an optically thick, geometrically thin accretion disk is investigated in the context of low luminosity AGN (LLAGN). We generalize the disk evaporation model used in the interpretative framework of black hole X-ray binaries…