When too much material tries to come together, everything starts to spin and flatten out. You get an accretion disc. Astronomers find them around newly forming stars, supermassive black holes and many other places in the Universe. Today we’ll talk about what it takes to get an accretion disc, and how they help us understand the objects inside.
Click here to download the episode.
Or subscribe to: astronomycast.com/podcast.xml with your podcatching software.
“Accretion Discs” on the Astronomy Cast website, with shownotes and transcript.
And the podcast is also available as a video, as Fraser and Pamela now record Astronomy Cast as part of a Google+ Hangout (usually recorded every Monday at 3 pm Eastern Time):
A recent study by an Australian-American team has provided compelling evidence that FRBs may be…
How do astronomers look for neutrinos? These small, massless particles whiz through the universe at…
At a recent national space conference, scientists with the Chinese Academy of Sciences shared the…
NASA engineers have completed assembling the core stage of the Artemis II rocket, which will…
A couple times a year, the Hubble Space Telescope turns its powerful gaze on the…
Jupiter’s moon, Europa, contains a large ocean of salty water beneath its icy shell, some…