introduction: due to limitations of current treatments for degenerative disc disease, arthroplastic methods to repair the diseased disc have been proposed. the artificial disc is a mobile implant for degenerative disc replacement that attempts to lessen the degeneration of the adjacent elements following interbody fusion procedures. because the success of artificial disc replacement depends on ...

Compact remnants – stellar mass black holes and neutron stars formed in the inner few parsec of galactic centres are predicted to sink into the central parsec due to dynamical friction on low mass stars, forming a high concentration cusp (Morris, 1993). Same physical region may also contain very high density molecular clouds and accretion discs that are needed to fuel SMBH activity. Here we est...

Context. To quantitatively decode the information stored within an observed spectrum, detailed modelling of physical state and accurate radiative transfer solution schemes are required. The accuracy model is then typically evaluated by comparing calculated spectra. In analysis stellar spectra, numerical often needs to account for binary companions 3D structures in envelopes. enigmatic (or multi...

Justham, Rappaport & Podsiadlowski (2006) recently suggested that black-hole lowmass X-ray binaries (BHLMXBs) with short orbital periods may have evolved from black-hole intermediate-mass X-ray binaries (BHIMXBs). In their model the secondaries in BHIMXBs are assumed to possess anomalously high magnetic fields, so that magnetic braking can lead to substantial loss of angular momentum. In this p...

We present HST, RXTE, and UKIRT observations of the broad band spectra of the black hole X-ray transient XTE J1859+226 during the decline from its 1999–2000 outburst. Our UV spectra define the 2175 Å interstellar absorption feature very well and based on its strength we estimate E(B − V ) = 0.58 ± 0.12. Hence we deredden our spectra and follow the evolution of the spectral energy distribution o...

The luminosities of the centers of nearby elliptical galaxies are very low compared to models of thin disc accretion to their black holes at the Bondi rate, typically a few hundredths to a few tenths of a solar mass per year. This has motivated models of inefficiently-radiated accretion that invoke weak electron-ion thermal coupling, and/or inhibited accretion rates due to convection or outflow...

We use global magnetohydrodynamic simulations, in a pseudo-Newtonian potential, to investigate the temporal variability of accretion discs around Schwarzschild black holes. We use the vertically-averaged magnetic stress in the simulated disc as a proxy for the rest-frame dissipation, and compute the observed emission by folding this through the transfer function describing the relativistic beam...