Wave-Mediated Boundary Layers of Accretion Discs: Role of Internal Structure of the Accretor

Disc accretion onto astrophysical objects with a material surface proceeds through the boundary layer (BL) — a radially narrow region in the inner disc where the incoming gas must slow down its rotation before settling onto the surface of the accretor. Here we numerically study a BL in which the angular momentum transport in the layer is accomplished via the excitation of global acoustic waves. While the earlier studies of such wave-mediated BLs typically modeled the internal structure of the central object as a globally isothermal sphere with sharply rising density profile, here we explore the effect of other internal density and temperature profiles on the mode operation. We model the inner structure of an accretor as a polytropic sphere, allowing a shallower increase of density and a non-trivial temperature profile inside the object. While the mix of acoustic modes observed in our long-duration (1000 inner orbits long) 2D hydrodynamic simulations is a weak function of the polytropic index n of the accretor’s structure, the mass accretion rate and the angular momentum flux across the BL show a clear dependence on n, both decreasing in amplitude as n is lowered. Interestingly, in 2D these transport metrics are better correlated not with n but with a total mass inside the central object contained within the simulation domain. These results improve our understanding of the wave-mediated BL accretion by quantifying the effect of the inner structure of the accretor on the excitation and propagation of acoustic modes mediating the BL transport.