Accretion disk

However, one must be careful because in an LMXB the optical emission from the accretion disk (whether in the outer, cool regions or as reprocessed X-ray emission) can outshine the companion by a large factor. This makes spectral lines difficult to measure and also complicates the ellipsoidal light curve technique. The ideal systems to study are therefore transient systems, which undergo periods of active mass transfer (often for a few weeks to a few months) before lapsing into quiescence, where there is little to no mass transfer. During quiescence, the companion is still distorted by the gravity of the neutron star, hence the flux variations still occur, but without any contamination by the accretion disk. There is a relatively new approach similar to this that... 

A more model-dependent way to constrain neutron star structure has to do with measurements of orbital frequencies in the accretion disk near the neutron star. Suppose that the frequency of some observed phenomenon could be identified with an orbital frequency vor >, and that this phenomenon lasted many cycles. The orbital radius f 0rb is clearly greater than the stellar radius R. In... 

Blackman, E.G., Perna, R. (2003), Pulsars with jets harbor dynamically important accretion disks , ApJ 601, L71. 

The first simulations of the collapsar scenario have been performed using 2D Newtonian, hydrodynamics (MacFadyen Woosley 1999) exploring the collapse of helium cores of more than 10 M . In their 2D simulation MacFadyen Woosley found the jet to be collimated by the stellar material into opening angles of a few degrees and to transverse the star within 10 s. The accretion process was estimated to occur for a few tens of seconds. In such a model variability in the lightcurve could result for example from (magneto-) hydrodynamic instabilities in the accretion disk that would translate into a modulation of the neutrino emission/annihilation processes or via Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities at the interface between the jet and the stellar mantle. 

Or from the physics side by which physical mechanisms are jets launched from accretion disks How are the ejecta accelerated to Lorentz factors beyond 100 How are the magnetic fields at the emission site created Are they... 

A wide range of phenomena is possible when a black hole absorbs matter very quickly from the disk around it after incomplete explosion of a rapidly rotating massive supernova. In the most extreme case, according to Stan Woosley (University of Santa Cruz), the shock wave resulting from the central explosion is unable to shatter the star (composed mainly of helium) and a black hole forms with an accretion disk around it. A high-intensity gamma burst then results. 

In recent years, a new source of information about stellar nucleosynthesis and the history of the elements between their ejection from stars and their incorporation into the solar system has become available. This source is the tiny dust grains that condensed from gas ejected from stars at the end of their lives and that survived unaltered to be incorporated into solar system materials. These presolar grains (Fig. 5.1) originated before the solar system formed and were part of the raw materials for the Sun, the planets, and other solar-system objects. They survived the collapse of the Sun s parent molecular cloud and the formation of the accretion disk and were incorporated essentially unchanged into the parent bodies of the chondritic meteorites. They are found in the fine-grained matrix of the least metamorphosed chondrites and in interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), materials that were not processed by high-temperature events in the solar system. 

Artistic rendering of four observed stages of star formation, (a) Class 0 object a deeply embedded hydrostatic core surrounded by a dense accretion disk. Strong bipolar jets remove angular momentum, (b) Class I object protostar in the later part of the main accretion phase, (c) Class II object or T Tauri star pre-main-sequence star with optically thick protoplanetary disk, (d) Class III object or naked T Tauri star star has an optically thin disk and thus can be directly observed. Some may have planets. 

Chondrules comprise the major portion of most chondrites, the most abundant type of meteorites. If the achondrites and terrestrial planets formed from chondrite-like precursors, then much, perhaps most of the solid matter in the inner solar system once existed as chondrules. Even if chondrules were restricted to the chondrites, the process that formed them was important in that region. The origin of chondrules is an important unsolved problem in cosmochemistry. Chondrules formed in the Sun s accretion disk through some sort of transient flash-heating event(s). Some CAIs apparently also were melted in the disk. What was the process (or processes) that melted the chondrules and CAIs Whatever it was, it dominated the disk for at least a few million years. 

To summarize, chondrules and CAIs formed by transient heating events that processed a large fraction of the matter in the accretion disk. These heating events appear to overprint the thermal processing that produced the volatile element depletions among chondrites. The exact nature of these events is unknown, although shock waves in the nebula and the X-wind model are currently receiving the most attention. 

It is also possible that neither of these mechanisms for providing water to the inner planets is correct. Another hypothesis is that absorption of water onto dust particles in the accretion disk might account for the Earth s oceans (Drake, 2005). As already mentioned, the amount of water required to explain Earth s water is not large on a per-gram basis. Regardless of whether comets, asteroids, or nebular particles were the source of our planet s oceans, the water likely came from more distant regions of the nebular disk. 

Cameron, A. G. W. (1978) Physics of the primitive solar accretion disk. Moon and Planets, 18, 5-40. 

Liffinan, K. and Brown, M. (1995) The motion and size sorting of particles ejected from a protostellar accretion disk. Icarus, 116, 275-290. 

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