This award provides funds to support cooperative research in theoretical astrophysics between the United States and China. Dr. Ronald Taam of Northwestern University and Professor Wang Deyu of the Purple Mountain Observatory, Nanjing, China, will work together under this grant to investigate interacting binary star systems, which have been demonstrated to be sites of energetic and occasionally highly transient activiity. Specifically, this study will focus on dynamical instabilities in thin accretion disks. This project is jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the Protocol on Cooperation in Basic Sciences signed in 1980 and renewed in 1986.
