Classroom Aid - Accretion Disk Dynamics
Channel: David Butler
Date: 2023-10-28

https://howfarawayisit.com
One of the ways for a black hole to form is to accumulate enough mass via an accretion disk to collapse. Here’s an illustration with a neutron star surrounded by an accretion disk supplied by gas from the stellar winds of a nearby blue giant star. Driven by inward gravitational forces and outward centripetal forces, infalling matter into massive objects like stars, neutrons stars, and black holes always form accretion disks. There are a wide variety of these complex structures, but they all have two basic characteristics: They are thin in that the disk’s radius is much much larger than its depth; and they are thick enough to ensure that photons created inside the disk will interact with matter inside the disk at least once before escaping.