Related papers: The evolution of misaligned accretion discs and sp…
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…
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…
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…
We simulate the viscous evolution of an accretion disc around a spinning black hole. In general any such disc is misaligned, and warped by the Lense-Thirring effect. Unlike previous studies we use effective viscosities constrained to be…
We argue that supermassive black hole growth in AGN occurs via sequences of randomly--oriented accretion discs with angular momentum limited by self--gravity. These stably co-- or counter--align with the black hole spin with almost equal…
Orientation of parsec-scale accretion disks in AGN is likely to be nearly random for different black hole feeding episodes. Since AGN accretion disks are unstable to self-gravity on parsec scales, star formation in these disks will create…
Warped accretion disks have attracted intensive attention because of their critical role on shaping the spin of supermassive massive black holes (SMBHs) through the Bardeen-Petterson effect, a general relativistic effect that leads to final…
We investigate the effect of black hole spin on warped or misaligned accretion discs - in particular i) whether or not the inner disc edge aligns with the black hole spin and ii) whether the disc can maintain a smooth transition between an…
Accretion discs around black holes can become warped by Lense-Thirring precession if the disc is tilted with respect to the black hole spin vector. When the disc viscosity is sufficiently large that warp propagation is diffusive, the inner…
We investigate the alignment processes of spinning black holes and their surrounding warped accretion disks in a frame of two different types of feeding at the outer boundaries. We consider (1) fixed flows in which gas is continually fed…
We consider the evolution of a warped disc around a Kerr black hole, under conditions such that the warp propagates in a wavelike manner. This occurs when the dimensionless effective viscosity, alpha, that damps the warp is less than the…
I review recent progresses in the dynamics and the evolution of self-gravitating accretion discs. Accretion discs are a fundamental component of several astrophysical systems on very diverse scales, and can be found around supermassive…
We model the overall shape of an accretion disc in a semi-detached binary system in which mass is transfered on to a spinning black hole the spin axis of which is misaligned with the orbital rotation axis. We assume the disc is in a steady…
We consider the shape of an accretion disc whose outer regions are misaligned with the spin axis of a central black hole and calculate the steady state form of the warped disc in the case where the viscosity and surface densities are power…
In a recent paper we have shown that the evolution of a misaligned disc around a spinning black hole can result in tearing the disc into many distinct planes. Tearing discs with random orientations produce direct dynamical accretion on to…
Luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) and X-Ray binaries (XRBs) often contain geometrically thin, radiatively cooled accretion discs. According to theory, these are -- in many cases -- initially highly misaligned with the black hole…
We show that in realistic cases of accretion in active galactic nuclei or stellar-mass X-ray binaries, the Lense-Thirring effect breaks the central regions of tilted accretion discs around spinning black holes into a set of distinct planes…
In this paper, we explore the gravitomagnetic interaction of a black hole (BH) with a misaligned accretion disc to study BH spin precession and alignment jointly with BH mass and spin parameter evolution, under the assumption that the disc…
Supermassive black holes at the centre of galactic nuclei mostly grow in mass through gas accretion over cosmic time. This process also modifies the angular momentum (or spin) of black holes, both in magnitude and in orientation. Despite…
The frequency of compact object interactions in AGN discs is naturally tied to the number of objects embedded within it. We investigate the evolution of black holes in the nuclear stellar cluster on inclined orbits to the AGN disc by…