2 April 2025: Matt Middelton

Speaker: Matt Middleton (Southampton)

Date: Wednesday 2 April 2025

Time: 15:00

Location: 3.21

Let’s rock: exploring misaligned super-Eddington accretion

Super-Eddington accretion (i.e. accretion at rates in excess of the classical Eddington limit) occurs across cosmic time, across all accretor mass scales, and crucially is the key ingredient needed to grow high redshift supermassive black holes (SMBHs) over the required short timescales. To learn about how such accretion and associated feedback operates, we study local analogues in the form of super-Eddington transients (e.g. Tidal Disruption Events) and persistently accreting binaries (the ultraluminous X-ray sources, ULXs). In this talk I will present what we’ve learnt so far and how numerical simulations are shedding new light on how super-Eddington accretion really works. I will present new work on how super-Eddington accretion, misaligned with the black hole spin axis, might solve a big issue with SMBH growth, how in some cases it can lead to rocking of the disc, and how we may have already seen this occurring in AGN and ULXs.