Published in

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science Advances, 9(1), 2015

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500686

arXiv, 2015

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1510.02471

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Accretion-induced variability links young stellar objects, white dwarfs, and black holes

Journal article published in 2015 by Simone Scaringi ORCID, Thomas J. Maccarone ORCID, E. Koerding, Elmar Körding, Christian Knigge ORCID, Simon Vaughan, Thomas R. Marsh, Ester Aranzana ORCID, Vikram S. Dhillon ORCID, Susana C. C. Barros ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Upload
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Upload
Policy details
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The central engines of disc-accreting stellar-mass black holes appear to be scaled down versions of the supermassive black holes that power active galactic nuclei. However, if the physics of accretion is universal, it should also be possible to extend this scaling to other types of accreting systems, irrespective of accretor mass, size, or type. We examine new observations, obtained with Kepler/K2 and ULTRACAM, regarding accreting white dwarfs and young stellar objects. Every object in the sample displays the same linear correlation between the brightness of the source and its amplitude of variability (rms-flux relation) and obeys the same quantitative scaling relation as stellar-mass black holes and active galactic nuclei. We also show that the most important parameter in this scaling relation is the physical size of the accreting object. This establishes the universality of accretion physics from proto-stars still in the star-forming process to the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. ; Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; published in Science Advances on 9 Oct 2015