Course info

Introduction to astrophysical gas dynamics. Thin discs (the alpha disc model, disc structure and their appearance), the thermal/viscous instability, resonances. Thick discs (including radiation-pressure dominated discs), self-gravitating discs and their stability (including the Toomre criterion). Relativistic disc accretion, optically thin advection-dominated flows, super-Eddington accretion, the source of disc viscosity (including the magneto-rotational instability), mass loss and jets from accretion discs. The course will emphasise a wide range of applications of accretion-disc theory, such as compact binaries, including black-hole binaries, ultraluminous X-ray sources, X-ray pulsars, protostellar systems, gamma-ray bursts.