Magneto-rotationally driven winds in accretion discs

Séminaire IPAG de Antoine Riols (Cambridge University), jeudi 24 novembre 2016 à 11h00, salle Manuel Forestini IPAG

Wind and jets, from protostellar to AGN discs, have been observed for decades and extensively studied but their connection to the turbulent dynamics of the underlying accretion disc is still poorly understood. Recently, it has been shown that the magnetorotational instability (MRI), often associated to turbulent activity and accretion in discs, might be also a key process in producing and accelerating outflows from the disc midplane. We conducted a suite of one-dimensional shearing-box simulations of stratified discs to better understand the relation between this instability and the wind dynamics on large scale. Our work suggests that the MRI can drive cyclic outflows and could be a possible mechanism that explains the observed time-variability in disk-jet systems.