Accretion disc viscosity: What do warped discs tell us?

Abstract

Standard, planar accretion discs operate through a dissipative mechanism, usually thought to be turbulent, and often modelled as a viscosity. This acts to take energy from the radial shear, enabling the flow of mass and angular momentum in the radial direction. In a previous paper, we discussed observational evidence for the magnitude of this viscosity, and pointed out discrepancies between these values and those obtained in numerical simulations. In this paper, we discuss the observational evidence for the magnitude of the dissipative effects which act in non-planar discs, both to transfer and to eliminate the non-planarity. Estimates based on the model by Ogilvie, which assumes a small-scale, isotropic viscosity, give alignment timescales for fully ionized discs which are apparently too short by a factor of a few compared with observations, although we emphasize that more detailed computations as well as tighter observational constraints are required to verify this conclusion. For discs with low temperature and conductivity, we find that the time-scales for disc alignment based on isotropic viscosity are too short by around two orders of magnitude. This large discrepancy suggests that our understanding of viscosity in quiescent discs is currently inadequate. © 2013 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.