Davide Gerosa

The Bardeen-Petterson effect in accreting supermassive black-hole binaries: disc breaking and critical obliquity

Breaking things is fun! In the previous paper of this series, we looked at accretion disks around massive black-hole binaries and found things were going awry. We kept on finding configurations that our implementation could not handle… And now we know this is real! Finding disk solutions when the spin of the black hole has a large misalignment is just not possible! And that’s because the disk really breaks into different sections. We’ve now checked it with state-of-the-art hydrodynamical numerical simulations that not only confirm what we suspected but also show some funny things (like breaking being prevented by disk spirals, etc). I was serious, breaking things is real fun!

Check out Rebecca’s beautiful movies!

Rebecca Nealon, Enrico Ragusa, Davide Gerosa, Giovanni Rosotti, Riccardo Barbieri.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 509 (2022) 5608–5621.
arXiv:2111.08065 [astro-ph.HE].

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