Physics – Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Nov 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002aps..dppri2001q&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, 44th Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma , abstract #RI2.001
Physics
Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Accretion of matter onto a central black hole produces some of the most dramatic and energetic phenomena in astrophysics: active galactic nuclei, X-ray binaries, and perhaps gamma-ray bursts. In this tutorial I review the theory of accreting black holes. I focus on the central role played by plasma processes in governing the transport of mass, momentum, and energy in the accreting gas. Throughout the talk I describe both recent progress and outstanding problems. Possibilities for cross-fertilization between the plasma physics and astrophysics communities are also highlighted. Matter accreting onto a black hole is typically rapidly rotating and well ionized, a configuration that is now known to be linearly unstable in MHD; this instability gives rise to magnetohydrodynamic turbulence that efficiently transports angular momentum, allowing accretion to proceed. Shocks, reconnection, and microscopic plasma processes (e.g., Landau damping) convert turbulent energy into thermal energy, some fraction of which is radiated away to produce the observed radiation. The buoyant rise of magnetic fields leads to the formation of a low density, strongly magnetized corona analogous to the solar corona. This corona may be the launching point for the relativistic jets that are observed from many accreting black holes. I conclude by highlighting a class of accretion models in which the plasma is macroscopically collisionless: the proton-electron collision time is much longer than time it takes the plasma to flow into the black hole. The dynamics and thermodynamics of such models depend on uncertain kinetic physics: e.g., the efficiency of "anomalous" (non-collisional) energy exchange between protons and electrons, whether energy dissipation primarily heats the protons or electrons, and the physics of angular momentum transport in kinetic theory.
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