Thermal Conduction and the Stability of Hot Accretion Flows

Abstract

Recently, Medvedev & Narayan (2001) discovered a new type of accretion flow, a hot settling flow around a rapidly rotating neutron star. The flow is cooling-dominated and energetically similar to the Shapiro, Lightman, & Eardley (1976, SLE) solution. Since the SLE solution is known to be thermally unstable, one might suspect that the new solution would also be unstable. However, due to the very high temperature of the accreting gas, thermal conduction is very strong and could suppress the thermal instability. We analyze the role of thermal conduction in both the hot settling flow and the SLE solution. In the hot settling flow collisions are very rare. Therefore, thermal transport occurs via free streaming of electrons along tangled magnetic field lines. We find that conduction is strong enough to make the flow marginally stable. In contrast, in the cooler SLE solution, conduction is via collisional, Spitzer-type transport. In this case, conduction is weaker, and we find that the SLE solution is thermally unstable even in the presence of conduction.