9/1/16: SO/NOAO Joint Colloquium Series: Omer Blaes, UCSB
Title: Confronting MHD Theories of Accretion Disks with Observations of Dwarf Novae
Abstract:
Accretion disks are of wide-ranging importance in astrophysics, being the sites of planet formation around young stars and being the structures responsible for liberating the enormous power output of quasars and gamma-ray bursts. Understanding how angular momentum is transported and gravitational binding energy is dissipated is of fundamental importance to how accretion disks work. MHD turbulence is almost certainly the central process in many (though probably not all) systems, but it has been only recently that serious confrontations between our theories of MHD turbulence and actual observational data has become possible. My talk will focus on one such confrontation involving dwarf novae: outbursting accretion disks around white dwarfs in binary systems. These outbursts are caused by a thermodynamic instability in the disk with short recurrence times, allowing for exquisitely detailed and extensive observations of their variability. Until recently, this variability has severely challenged our MHD theories, but we believe that we may have recently solved this problem. This in turn has led to new physical insights and new puzzles that remain to be solved.
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