The hot accretion flow (such as advection-dominated accretion flow) is usually optically thin in the radial direction, therefore the photons produced at one radius can travel for a long distance without being absorbed and heat or cool electrons at other radii via Compton scattering. This effect has been ignored in most previous works on hot accretion flows and is the focus of this paper. If the...

We have investigated the planetesimal accretion rate onto giant planets that are growing through gas accretion, using numerical simulations and analytical arguments. We derived the condition for gap opening in the planetesimal disk, which is determined by a competition between the expansion of the planet’s Hill radius due to the planet growth and the damping of planetesimal eccentricity due to ...

We present evidence of magnetically-mediated disk accretion in Herbig Ae/Be stars. Magnetospheric accretion models of Balmer and sodium profiles calculated with appropriate stellar and rotational parameters are in qualitative agreement with the observed profiles of the Herbig Ae star UX Ori, and yield a mass accretion rate of ∼ 10 M⊙ yr. If more recent indications of an extremely large rotation...

Accretion disk theory was first developed as a theory with the local heat balance, where the whole energy produced by a viscous heating was emitted to the sides of the disk. One of the most important new invention of this theory was the phenomenological treatment of the turbulent viscosity , known the " alpha " prescription, where the (rφ) component of the stress tensor was approximated by (αp)...

Chondrules are millimeter-sized spherules that dominate primitive meteorites (chondrites) originating from the asteroid belt. The incorporation of chondrules into asteroidal bodies must be an important step in planet formation, but the mechanism is not understood. We show that the main growth of asteroids can result from gas drag-assisted accretion of chondrules. The largest planetesimals of a ...

We consider the distribution of local supermassive black hole Eddington ratios and accretion rates, accounting for the dependence of radiative efficiency and bolometric corrections on the accretion rate. We find that black hole mass growth, both of the integrated mass density and the masses of most individual objects, must be dominated by an earlier, radiatively efficient, high accretion rate s...

N -body simulations predict that CDM halo-assembly occurs in two phases: 1) a fast accretion phase with a rapidly deepening potential well; and 2) a slow accretion phase characterised by a gentle addition of mass to the outer halo with little change in the inner potential well. We demonstrate, using one-dimensional simulations, that this two-phase accretion leads to CDM halos of the NFW form an...

The Bondi-Hoyle formula gives the approximate accretion rate onto a point particle accreting from a uniform medium. However, in many situations accretion onto point particles occurs from media that are turbulent rather than uniform. In this paper, we give an approximate solution to the problem of a point particle accreting from an ambient medium of supersonically turbulent gas. Accretion in suc...

We demonstrate that generically an accretion disk around a compact object could have a new type of instability in that the accretion flow need not be symmetric with respect to the equatorial plane even when matter is supplied symmetrically farther out. We find that this behaviour is mainly due to interaction of outgoing matter bounced off the centrifugal barrier and the incoming accretion. We b...

The growth of galaxies is driven by two processes: mergers with other galaxies and smooth accretion of intergalactic gas. The relative share of this two processes depends on the environment (rich cluster or field), and determines the morphological evolution of the galaxy. In this work we focus on the properties of accretion onto galaxies. Through numerical simulations we investigate the geometr...