Abstract
Others have proposed1 that thick disks of material accreting around black holes may be subject to a runaway instability. If the mass of the disk exceeds a critical value (mdisk > 0.01 Mhole), the disk drains into the hole on a dynamical time scale. We report here a study of this effect, using models of non-self-gravitating disks in the Kerr metric, which enables proper allowance to be made for the effects of black-hole rotation and the increase in the spin of the hole as it accretes. We conclude that there is no runaway instability in these systems.
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Wilson, D. A runaway instability in thick accretion disks?. Nature 312, 620–621 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1038/312620a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/312620a0
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