Open AccessCritical properties of spherically symmetric black hole accretion in Schwarzschild geometry
Author(s) -
Mandal Ipsita,
Ray Arnab K.,
Das Tapas K.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.058
H-Index - 383
eISSN - 1365-2966
pISSN - 0035-8711
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.11898.x
Subject(s) - physics , schwarzschild radius , polytropic process , schwarzschild metric , saddle point , inviscid flow , accretion (finance) , critical point (mathematics) , classical mechanics , kerr metric , general relativity , geometry , astrophysics , mathematics
The stationary, spherically symmetric, polytropic and inviscid accretion flow in the Schwarzschild metric has been set‐up as an autonomous first‐order dynamical system, and it has been studied completely analytically. Of the three possible critical points in the flow, the one that is physically realistic behaves like the saddle point of the standard Bondi accretion problem. One of the two remaining critical points exhibits the strange mathematical behaviour of being either a saddle point or a centre‐type point, depending on the values of the flow parameters. The third critical point is always unphysical and behaves like a centre‐type point. The treatment has been extended to pseudo‐Schwarzschild flows for comparison with the general relativistic analysis.