Self-similar accretion in thin disks around near-extremal black holes [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00022


Near-maximally spinning black holes display conformal symmetry in their near-horizon region, which is therefore the locus of critical phenomena. In this paper we revisit the Novikov-Thorne accretion thin disk model and find a new self-similar radiation-dominated solution in the extremely high spin regime. Motivated by the self-consistency of the model, we require that matter flows at the sound speed at the innermost stable orbit (ISCO). We observe that, when the disk pressure is dominated by radiation at the ISCO, which occurs for the best-fit Novikov-Thorne model of GRS 1915+105, the Shakura-Sunyaev viscosity parameter can be expressed in terms of the spin, mass accretion rate and radiative efficiency. We quantitatively describe how the exact thin disk solution approaches the self-similar solution in the vicinity of the ISCO and for increasing spins.

Read this paper on arXiv…

G. Compere and R. Oliveri
Thu, 2 Mar 17
7/44

Comments: 13 pages, 6 figures, to be submitted to MNRAS