Magnetically Dominated Disks in Tidal Disruption Events and Quasi-Periodic Eruptions

Understand

The classical radiation pressure instability has been a persistent theoretical feature of thin, radiatively efficient accretion disks with accretion rates 1 to 100 per cent of the Eddington rate.

• But there is only limited evidence of its occurrence in nature: rapid heartbeat oscillations of a few X-ray binaries and now, perhaps, the new class of hourly X-ray transients called quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs).
• The accretion disks formed in tidal disruption events (TDEs) have been observed to peacefully trespass through the range of unstable accretion rates without exhibiting any clear sign of the instability.
• We try to explain the occurrence or otherwise of this instability in these systems, by constructing steady state 1D models of thin magnetic accretion disks.