Mass and spin coevolution during the alignment of a black hole in a warped accretion disc

Details Mass and spin coevolution during the alignment of a black hole in a warped accretion disc Mass and spin coevolution during the alignment of a black hole in a warped accretion disc

2009-07-21

arxiv.org/abs/0907.3742v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

20 pages, 15 figures (jpg or png format), 3 tables; to be published in MNRAS

Scientific paper

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 is continually fed, in its outer region, by matter with angular momentum fixed on a given direction. We develop an iterative scheme based on the adiabatic approximation to study the BH-disc coevolution: in this approach, the accretion disc transits through a sequence of quasi-steady warped states (Bardeen-Petterson effect) and interacts with the BH until the BH spin aligns with the outer angular momentum direction. For a BH aligning with a co-rotating disc, the fractional increase in mass is typically less than a few percent, while the spin modulus can increase up to a few tens of percent. The alignment timescale is between ~ 100 thousands and ~ 1 millions years for a maximally rotating BH accreting at the Eddington rate. BH-disc alignment from an initially counter-rotating disc tends to be more efficient compared to the specular co-rotating case due to the asymmetry seeded in the Kerr metric: counter-rotating matter carries a larger and opposite angular momentum when crossing the innermost stable orbit, so that the spin modulus decreases faster and so the relative inclination angle.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Mass and spin coevolution during the alignment of a black hole in a warped accretion disc does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Mass and spin coevolution during the alignment of a black hole in a warped accretion disc, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Mass and spin coevolution during the alignment of a black hole in a warped accretion disc will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-127741