Counter-rotating Accretion Disks

Abstract

We consider accretion disks consisting of counter-rotating gaseous components with an intervening shear layer. Configurations of this type may arise from the accretion of newly supplied counter-rotating gas onto an existing co-rotating gas disk. For simplicity we consider the case where the gas well above the disk midplane is rotating with angular rate $+\Omega$ and that well below has the same properties but is rotating with rate $-\Omega$. Using the Shakura-Sunyaev alpha turbulence model, we find self-similar solutions where a thin (relative to the full disk thickness) equatorial layer accretes very rapidly, essentially at free-fall speed. As a result the accretion speed is much larger than it would be for an alpha disk rotating in one direction. Counter-rotating accretion disks may be a transient stage in the formation of counter-rotating galaxies and in the accretion of matter onto compact objects.

7 pages, 3 figures, aas2pp4.sty, submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (1)

• Formation of Massive Counterrotating Disks in Spiral Galaxies

Cited by in corpus (18)

• General Relativistic Simulations of Jet Formation in a Rapidly Rotating Black Hole Magnetosphere
• Ionized gas and stellar kinematics of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies
• A Broad Search for Counterrotating Gas and Stars: Evidence for Mergers and Accretion
• Misaligned disks induced by infall
• Spectroscopic evidence of distinct stellar populations in the counter-rotating stellar disks of NGC 3593 and NGC 4550
• The Formation of S0 Galaxies with Counter-Rotating Neutral and Molecular Hydrogen
• Ringed accretion disks: instabilities
• Counter-Rotating Accretion Discs
• Ringed accretion disks: evolution of double toroidal configurations
• Two-Stream Instability of Counter-Rotating Galaxies
• Hydrodynamic Simulations of Counterrotating Accretion Disks
• RADs energetics and constraints on emerging tori collisions around super-massive Kerr Black Holes
• Relating Kerr SMBHs in Active Galactic Nuclei to RAD configurations
• Influence of toroidal magnetic field in multi-accreting tori
• Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability of Counter-Rotating Discs
• SDSS IV MaNGA: Characteristics of Edge-on Galaxies with a Counter-rotating Gaseous Disk
• Embedded BHs and multipole globules: Clustered misaligned thick accretion disks around static SMBHs
• Lense-Thirring effect on accretion flow from counter-rotating tori