Sentences with phrase «as an accretion disc»

Known as an accretion disc, it is the place where material gradually spirals inwards towards the black hole.

Not exact matches

The study found a relationship between the size of the central object and the speed of the flickering produced by the disc, suggesting the physics of the accretion must be very similar around these different astronomical objects despite them being completely different in other ways, such as size, age, temperature and gravity.

The researchers found that relatively cool accretion discs around young stars, whose inner edges can be several times the size of the Sun, show the same behaviour as the hot, violent accretion discs around planet - sized white dwarfs, city - sized black holes and supermassive black holes as large as the entire Solar system, supporting the universality of accretion physics.

Models suggest that accretion discs could reach the size of a solar system and glow as brightly as a star.

Such discs, known as quasar accretion disks, are typically about 100 billion kilometers across, and most lay billions of light - years away.

So if astronomers can understand the physics of the matter that is flowing into the black hole, they can use it to test the predictions of general relativity as never before — but only if the movement of the matter in the accretion disc can be completely understood.

We interpret this periodicity as a property of the accretion disc, most likely a long - term precession, where the disc edge structure and X-ray irradiation is responsible for the hard X-ray dips and modulation, although we discuss other possible explanations, including Lense - Thirring precession in the inner disc region and spectral state variations.