Andrew R. King

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Andrew R. King (born February 10, 1947 ) is a British theoretical astrophysicist. He is a professor at the University of Leicester .

He deals with astrophysical hydrodynamics, especially accretion disks, strong X-ray sources, galaxy formation, active galactic nuclei with massive central black holes, tight binary star systems with compact, massive partners, and mechanisms for gamma-ray bursts .

Together with Chris Nixon and Daniel Price, he found an accretion mechanism in simulations that could explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that arose early in the universe from incident gas masses (2012). He considered the case not aligned with the spin of the black hole, but several inclined accretion disks. The compensation of the angular momentum enabled black holes to grow more than 100 times higher in the simulations.

From simulations of binary star systems in which a partner is a massive object that withdraws gas from a companion star via the formation of an accretion disk, he found confirmation that sudden X-ray bursts point to black holes, but continuous radiation to neutron stars in the center, because that is where the radiation from the star surface (which is missing in black holes) provides stabilization.

In 2003 he developed a model for the formation of supermassive black holes in galaxies and their interaction with the host galaxy, which reproduces well the M-sigma relation found in 1999 between the masses of the supermassive black holes and the velocity dispersion of the stars in the bulge of the host galaxy (better than a model by Joseph Silk and Martin Rees from 1998)

King heads the UK Astrophysical Fluids Facility (UKAFF) with James Edward Pringle .

For 2014 he received the Eddington Medal .

Fonts

  • with J. Frank, DJ Raine Accretion Power in Astrophysics , 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press 2002
  • with JE Pringle Astrophysical Flows , Cambridge University Press, 2007
  • Accretion and Outflow in Active Galaxies, in BM Peterson, RS Somerville, T. Storchi-Bergmann (Ed.) Co-Evolution of Central Black Holes and Galaxies , IAU Symposium 2010, Arxiv
  • Accretion in compact binaries, in: WHG Lewin, M. van der Klis (Ed.), Compact Stellar X-Ray Sources , Arxiv 2003
  • Black Holes, Galaxy Formation, and the MBH-σ Relation, The Astrophysical Journal Letters , Volume 596, 2003, L27-L2, Arxiv

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ King, Nixon, Price Rapid AGN accretion from counter-rotating discs , Monthly Notices Roy. Astron. Soc., Preprint 2012, Arxiv
  2. ^ Black holes really are black, Royal Astronomical Society 1997
  3. ↑ Silk, Rees, Quasars and galaxy formation, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 331, 1998, L1-L4
personal data
SURNAME King, Andrew
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1947