Three Dimensional MHD Simulation of Circumbinary Accretion Disks -2. Net Accretion Rate

Understand

When an accretion disk surrounds a binary rotating in the same sense, the binary exerts strong torques on the gas.

• Analytic work in the 1D approximation indicated that these torques sharply diminish or even eliminate accretion from the disk onto the binary.
• However, recent 2D and 3D simulational work has shown at most modest diminution.
• We present new MHD simulations demonstrating that for binaries with mass ratios of 1 and 0.1 there is essentially no difference between the accretion rate at large radius in the disk and the accretion rate onto the binary.