Numerical Simulation of an Accretion Disk

Image by Gregory Foss, PSC.

J. Hawley, S. Balbus (Univ. of Virginia) and J.Stone (Univ. of Maryland) are using the PSC supercomputers to investigate astrophysical accretion disks orbitting around compact stars. Here an initially uniform ring of gas in orbit around a black hole breaks into dense blobs due to the growth of axial hydrodynamic instability.

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