This award will support a theoretical program that will create complex general relativistic radiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulations to study black hole accretion flows. These flows will be modeled over a wide spatial scale from the immediate vicinity of the black hole to many hundred times the radius of the black hole. The project has several goals: (1) studying instabilities in the accretion disk, (2) exploring how strong radiation pressure alters the power and orientation of jets associated with black hole accretion, and (3) establishing the impact of radiation pressure in driving strong outflows.
The contribute to the training of undergraduate students and to ongoing efforts to incorporate research results into the curriculum at the College of Charleston. The work is expected to have an impact on the study of black holes of a variety of masses, including those that drive active galactic nuclei.
