Related papers: Constraints on AGN accretion disc viscosity derive…
The origin of short timescale (weeks/months) variability of AGN, whether due to intrinsic disc variations or reprocessing of X-ray emission by a surrounding accretion disc, has been a puzzle for many years. However recently a number of…
The appearance and time variability of accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars (hereafter AMXPs, e.g. Wijnands & van der Klis 1998) depends strongly on the accretion rate, the effective viscosity and the effective magnetic diffusivity of the…
We present a model for the short timescale spectral variability of accreting black holes. It describes well the time-averaged spectra as well as temporal characteristics such as power-density spectrum, time/phase lags, and coherence…
We use the mean-field dynamo equations to show that an incoherent alpha effect in mirror-symmetric turbulence in a shearing flow can generate a large scale, coherent magnetic field. We illustrate this effect with simulations of a few simple…
Microlensing perturbations to the flux ratios of gravitationally lensed quasar images can vary with wavelength because of the chromatic dependence of the accretion disk's apparent size. Multiwavelength observations of microlensed quasars…
We explore the presence of torques at the inner edges of geometrically-thin black hole accretion disks using 3-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations in a pseudo-Newtonian potential. By varying the saturation level of the…
Accretion disk theory was first developed as a theory with the local heat balance, where the whole energy produced by a viscous heating was emitted to the sides of the disk. One of the most important new invention of this theory was the…
A certain appeal to the alpha model for turbulence and related viscosity in accretion disks was that one scales the Reynolds stresses simply on the thermal pressure, assuming that turbulence driven by a certain mechanism will attain a…
Nonlinear time-dependent calculations have been carried out in order to study the evolution of the thermal instability for optically thick, transonic, slim accretion discs around black holes. In the present calculations we have investigated…
We examine here the inner region accretion flows onto black holes. A variety of models are presented. We also discuss viscosity mechanisms under a variety of circumstances, for standard accretion disks onto galactic black holes and…
The conventional thermal instability criterion can not be applied to the advection-dominated accretion disks around black holes where the radiative cooling is insufficient to balance the viscous heating. The surface density change…
Warped accretion discs in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) exert a torque on the black hole that tends to align the rotation axis with the angular momentum of the outer disc. We compute the magnitude of this torque by solving numerically for…
We derive a viscosity from gravitational instability in self-gravitating accretion disks, which has the required properties to account for the observed fast formation of the first super-massive black holes in highly redshifted quasars and…
The characteristic timescale ($\tau$) of continuum variability of the accretion disk in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is known to be related to the thermal timescale, which is predicted to scale with AGN luminosity ($L$) and restframe…
(abridged) The soft excess seen in the X-ray spectra of many high mass accretion rate AGN can be well modelled by reflection from a partially ionised accretion disc. However, the derived parameters are often extreme, both in terms of the…
As a class, LINERs and Low-Luminosity AGN tend to show little or no significant short-term variability (i.e., with time-scales less than a day). This is a marked break for the trend of increased variability in Seyfert 1 galaxies with…
We investigate angular momentum transport and accretion properties in a sample of protoplanetary discs with dynamical measurements of stellar masses, disc masses, and scale radii. From these data we infer effective $\alpha$-viscosities,…
Accretion disks around compact objects are expected to enter an unstable phase at high luminosity. One instability may occur when the radiation pressure generated by accretion modifies the disk viscosity, resulting in the cyclic depletion…
Grid-based magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations have proven invaluable for the study of astrophysical accretion disks. However, the fact that angular momentum transport in disks is mediated by MHD turbulence (with structure down to very…
Disc spectra from highly luminous black hole binaries are observed to be rather simple, despite theoretical predictions to the contrary. We collate the disc-dominated spectra from multiple observations of 10 separate sources, and show that…