On the limit-cycle instability in magnetized accretion discs

Abstract

Observational evidence accumulated over the past decade indicates that accretion discs in X-ray binaries are viscously stable unless they accrete very close to the Eddington limit. This is at odds with the most basic standard accretion disc theory, but could be explained by either having the discs to be much cooler whereby they are not radiation pressure dominated, or a more sophisticated viscosity law. Here we argue that the latter is taking place in practice, on the basis of a stability analysis that assumes that the magnetorotational instability (MRI) responsible for generating the turbulent stresses inside the discs is also the source for a magnetically dominated corona. We show that observations of stable discs in the high/soft states of black hole binaries, on the one hand, and of the strongly variable microquasar GRS 1915+105 on the other, can all be explained if the magnetic turbulent stresses inside the disc scale proportionally to the geometric mean of gas and total pressure with a constant of proportionality (viscosity parameter) having a value of a few times 10-2. Implications for bright AGN are also briefly discussed. © 2006 RAS.