Related papers: Warped discs and the directional stability of jets…
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…
In this paper we consider the process of alignment of a spinning black hole and a surrounding misaligned accretion disc. We use a simplified set of equations, that describe the evolution of the system in the case where the propagation of…
The inner parts of an accretion disk around a spinning black hole are forced to align with the spin of the hole by the Bardeen-Petterson effect. Assuming that any jet produced by such a system is aligned with the angular momentum of either…
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…
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…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are powered by the accretion of disks of gas onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Stars and stellar remnants orbiting the SMBH in the nuclear star cluster (NSC) will interact with the AGN disk. Orbiters…
Disc accretion on to a black hole is often misaligned from its spin axis. If the disc maintains a significant magnetic field normal to its local plane, we show that dipole radiation from Lense-Thirring precessing disc annuli can extract a…
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…
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…
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…
Galactic outflows, driven by active galactic nuclei (AGN), play a crucial role in galaxy formation and in the self-regulated growth of supermassive black holes (BHs). AGN feedback couples to and affects gas, rather than stars, and in many,…
We study a warping instability of a geometrically thin, non-self-gravitating disk surrounding binary supermassive black holes on a circular orbit. Such a circumbinary disk is subject to not only tidal torques due to the binary gravitational…
We examine all possible stationary, optically thick, geometrically thin accretion disc models relevant for active galactic nuclei (AGN) and identify the physical regimes in which they are stable against the thermal-viscous hydrogen…
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 propose that the accretion disks fueling active galactic nuclei are supported vertically against gravity by a strong toroidal ($\phi-$direction) magnetic field that develops naturally as the result of an accretion disk dynamo. The…
We propose a solution to the problem of accretion disc sizes in active galactic nuclei being larger when measured by reverberation mapping than predicted by theory. Considering blackbody reprocessing on a disc with thickness profile $H(r)$,…
The disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are expected to be populated by numerous stars, either formed in the outer regions of the disk via gravitational instability, or captured from the nearby nuclear star cluster. Regardless of their…
We analyze the broadband photometric light curves of Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Sergeev et al. (2005) sample and find that a) perturbations propagating across the continuum emitting region are a general phenomenon securely detected in most…
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…
We present results from fully general relativistic three-dimensional numerical studies of thick-disk accretion onto a rapidly-rotating (Kerr) black hole with a spin axis that is tilted (not aligned) with the angular momentum vector of the…