The Structure of Cooling Fronts in Accretion Disks：（在吸积盘冷却方面的结构）.pdfVIP

The Structure of Cooling Fronts in Accretion Disks Ethan T. Vishniac Department of Astronomy, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712; ethan@astro.as.utexas.edu ABSTRACT 7 9 9 1 Recent work has shown that the speed of the cooling front in soft X-ray n transients may be an important clue in understanding the nature of accretion a J disk viscosity. In a previous paper (Vishniac and Wheeler 1996) we derived 9 the scaling law for the cooling front speed. Here we derive a similarity solution 1 for the hot inner part of disks undergoing cooling. This solution is exact in v the limit of a thin disk, power law opacities, and a minimum hot state column 6 4 density which is an infinitesimal fraction of the maximum cold state density. 0 1 For a disk of finite thickness the largest error is in the ratio of the mass flow 0 across the cooling front to the mass flow at small radii. Comparison to the 7 9 numerical simulations of Cannizzo et al. (1995) indicates that the errors in other / q h parameters do not exceed (csF /rF ΩF ) , that is, the ratio of the sound speed at p- the disk midplane to its orbital velocity, evaluated at the cooling front, to the o qth power. Here q ≈ 1/2. Its precise value is determined by the relevant hot r t state opacity law and the functional form of the dimensionless viscosity. s a : v i X 1. Introduction r a The most popular model for soft X-ray transients an