A Cosmic Battery

Abstract

We show that the Poynting-Robertson drag effect in an optically thin advection-dominated accretion flow around active gravitating objects generates strong azimuthal electric currents which give rise to astrophysically significant magnetic fields. Although the mechanism is most effective in accreting compact objects, it seems very promising to also account for the generation of stellar dipolar fields during the late protostellar collapse phase, when the star approaches the main sequence.

12 pages Latex, 1 postscript figure, to appear in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (2)

• Primordial Magnetic Fields, Right Electrons, and the Abelian Anomaly
• Primordial Magnetic Fields from Cosmological First Order Phase Transitions

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