Tilted Thick-Disk Accretion onto a Kerr Black Hole
Chris Fragile
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
fragile@llnl.gov
Additional authors: Peter Anninos
We present results from three-dimensional, general relativistic numerical studies of tilted thick-disk accretion onto a rapidly-rotating (Kerr) black hole. These results may be relevant to X-ray binaries, active-galactic nuclei, core-collapse supernovas, and gamma-ray burst progenitors. In this work, we explore three different values for the initial tilt of the disk: 0, 15, and 30 degrees. We initialize each model with the solution for an aligned, constant angular momentum, accreting thick disk around a black hole with spin parameter: a/M=+0.9 (prograde disk). The black hole is then instantaneously tilted using a transformation of the metric. The disk is allowed to respond to the Lense-Thirring precession of the tilted black hole. As expected, the tilted disks gradually reach a quasi-static twisted, warped configuration.
