_{Asia Hubbard, Trent Brooks}

^{Advised by B. Connor McClellan}

This project explores the equations of the thin disk accretion model, considered with both Newtonian gravity and General Relativity (Novikov & Thorne, 1973). This README provides an overview of the project and its current status. Notes on key topics and discoveries are added as the project progresses. Tutorials for running Python and Jupyter Notebooks are included in the thindisk/tutorials directory.

Student researchers are performing data reduction on a 3-D simulation of a black hole accretion disk to extract radial profiles of the gas density, temperature, and energy density. These will be compared with the analytic model.

Student researchers extended their Python skills by adding units to the code and changing the physical parameters of the model (black hole mass, mass accretion rate, interior radius) to see their effects on the radial flux profile.

Students developed skills in Python, creating plots of the radial flux profile of an accretion disk using the thin disk equations.

Accretion

Gravitational forces from massive objects pull things inwards. Accretion is what happens when matter actually falls on to the central object. In a lot of cases, due to conservation of angular momentum and friction forces, the matter will organize itself into a disk as it falls inwards, called an accretion disk^(source).

git

git is a free and open-source version control system. You can install it on your computer and use it to track updates you make to files. Think about it in terms of this example: say you make a document called report.doc. Then you make some changes, but don't want to overwrite what you had before, so you call it report_updated.doc. A few hours later and your file is called report_updated_v3_FINAL_FINAL.doc, with 10 different versions floating around in your folder. Instead, you can use git and have just a single document which has its entire edit history stored so you can revisit old versions, revert changes, and even make "branches" for organizing multiple versions of the document at once.

GitHub

A web-based platform for storing git-tracked folders and their contents online. Repositories can be managed and "pushed" to by multiple users, meaning many people can work on the same code at once and git will do its best to merge the edits.

Python

A programming language that's very user-friendly, and because of which has earned widespread popularity among scientists and researchers in the last decade. You can download Python from a lot of places, but one of the best options is Anaconda Python, which is a distribution of python that comes pre-packaged with a lot of useful science tools.

Jupyter Notebook

An Interactive Development Environment that lets you edit Python (.py) or IPython Notebook (.ipynb) files in your web browser. Unlike most other editors, it allows you to run chunks of code in "cells" rather than running an entire script at once. Jupyter is particularly well-suited for tutorials because its segmented nature turns any script into a step-by-step procedure that's easier to follow than a lot of other code.