The first comprehensive and up-to-date review of our new understanding of accretion disks around black holes - with chapters from experts from around the world.

With the advent of space observatories and modern developments in ground based astronomy and concurrent progress in the theoretical understanding of these observations it has become clear that accretion of material on to compact objects is an ubiquitous mechanism powering very diverse astrophysical sources ranging in size and luminosity by many orders of magnitude. A problem common to these systems is that the material accreted must in general get rid of its angular momentum and this leads to the formation of an Accretion Disk which allows angular momentum re-distribution and converts potential energy into radiation with an efficiency which can be higher than the nuclear burning yield. These systems range in size from quasars and active galactic nuclei to accretion disks around forming stars and the early solar system and to compact binaries such as cataclysmic variables and low-mass X-ray binaries. Other objects that should be mentioned in this context are 88433, the black hole binary candidates, and possibly gamma-ray burst sources. Observations of these systems have provided important constraints for theoretical accretion disk models on widely differing scales, lumi nosities, mass-transfer rates and physical environments.

This book highlights selected topics of standard and modern theory of accretion onto black holes and magnetized neutron stars. The structure of stationary standard discs and non-stationary viscous processes in accretion discs are discussed to the highest degree of accuracy analytic theory can provide, including relativistic effects in flat and warped discs around black holes. A special chapter is dedicated to a new theory of subsonic settling accretion onto a rotating magnetized neutron star. The book also describes supercritical accretion in quasars and its manifestation in lensing events. Several chapters cover the underlying physics of viscosity in astrophysical discs with some important aspects of turbulent viscosity generation. The book is aimed at specialists as well as graduate students interested in the field of theoretical astrophysics.

Accretion disks in compact stellar systems containing white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes are the principal laboratory for understanding the role of accretion disks in a wide variety of environments from proto-stars to quasars. Recent work on disk instabilities and dynamics has given a new theoretical framework with which to study accretion disks. Modeling of time-dependent phenomena provides new insight into the causes and interpretation of photometric and spectroscopic variability and new constraints on the fundamental physical problem — the origin of viscosity in accretion disks. This book contains expert reviews on the nature of limit cycle thermal instabilities and a variety of closely related topics from the theory of angular momentum transport to eclipse mapping of the disk structure. The result is a comprehensive contemporary survey of the structure and evolution of accretion disks in compact binary systems.

Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems. Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once — setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.

Based on graduate school lectures in contemporary relativity and gravitational physics, this book gives a complete and unified picture of the present status of theoretical and observational properties of astrophysical black holes. The chapters are written by internationally recognized specialists. They cover general theoretical aspects of black hole astrophysics, the theory of accretion and ejection of gas and jets, stellar-sized black holes observed in the Milky Way, the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes in galactic centers and quasars as well as their influence on the dynamics in galactic nuclei. The final chapter addresses analytical relativity of black holes supporting theoretical understanding of the coalescence of black holes as well as being of great relevance in identifying gravitational wave signals. With its introductory chapters the book is aimed at advanced graduate and post-graduate students, but it will also be useful for specialists.

Beyond Einstein’s Gravity is a graduate level introduction to extended theories of gravity and cosmology, including variational principles, the weak-field limit, gravitational waves, mathematical tools, exact solutions, as well as cosmological and astrophysical applications. The book provides a critical overview of the research in this area and unifies the existing literature using a consistent notation. Although the results apply in principle to all alternative gravities, a special emphasis is on scalar-tensor and f(R) theories. They were studied by theoretical physicists from early on, and in the 1980s they appeared in attempts to renormalize General Relativity and in models of the early universe. Recently, these theories have seen a new lease of life, in both their metric and metric-affine versions, as models of the present acceleration of the universe without introducing the mysterious and exotic dark energy. The dark matter problem can also be addressed in extended gravity. These applications are contributing to a deeper understanding of the gravitational interaction from both the theoretical and the experimental point of view. An extensive bibliography guides the reader into more detailed literature on particular topics.