https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20136401002
Disk accretion onto a magnetized star
1 P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Leninsky Prospect 53, Moscow 119991, Russia
2 N. Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Bartycka 18, PL-00-716 Warszawa, Poland
a e-mail: istomin@lpi.ru
b e-mail: haensel@camk.edu.pl
Published online: 8 January 2014
The problem of interaction of the rotating magnetic field, frozen to a star, with a thin well conducting accretion disk is solved exactly. It is shown that a disk pushes the magnetic field lines towards a star, compressing the stellar dipole magnetic field. At the point of corotation, where the Keplerian rotation frequency coincides with the frequency of the stellar rotation, the loop of the electric current appears. The electric currents flow in the magnetosphere only along two particular magnetic surfaces, which connect the corotation region and the inner edge of a disk with the stellar surface. It is shown that the closed current surface encloses the magnetosphere. Rotation of a disk is stopped at some distance from the stellar surface, which is 0.55 of the corotation radius. Accretion from a disk spins up the stellar rotation. The angular momentum transferred to the star is determined.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2014
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
