Accretion Disks In Compact Stellar Systems

Download or read book Accretion Disks In Compact Stellar Systems written by J Craig Wheeler and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1993-12-22 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accretion disks in compact stellar systems containing white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes are the principal laboratory for understanding the role of accretion disks in a wide variety of environments from proto-stars to quasars. Recent work on disk instabilities and dynamics has given a new theoretical framework with which to study accretion disks. Modeling of time-dependent phenomena provides new insight into the causes and interpretation of photometric and spectroscopic variability and new constraints on the fundamental physical problem — the origin of viscosity in accretion disks. This book contains expert reviews on the nature of limit cycle thermal instabilities and a variety of closely related topics from the theory of angular momentum transport to eclipse mapping of the disk structure. The result is a comprehensive contemporary survey of the structure and evolution of accretion disks in compact binary systems.