A complete analytical and numerical treatment of all magnetohydrodynamic waves and instabilities for radially stratified, magnetized accretion disks is presented. The instabilities are a possible source of anomalous transport. While recovering results on known hydrodynamic and both weak-and strong-field mag-netohydrodynamic perturbations, the full magnetohydrodynamic spectra for a realistic acc...

From millimeter observations of classical T Tauri stars, it is suggested that dust grains in circumstellar disks have grown to millimeter size or larger. However, gas drag on such large grains induces rapid accretion of the dust. We examine the evolution of dust disks composed of millimeter sized grains, and show that rapid accretion of the dust disk causes attenuation of millimeter continuum e...

We discuss non-self-gravitating hydrodynamic disks in the thin disk limit. These systems are stable according to the Rayleigh criterion, and yet there is some evidence that the dissipative and transport processes in these disks are hydrodynamic in nature at least some of the time. We draw on recent work on the hydrodynamics of laboratory shear flows. Such flows are often experimentally unstable...

Current stellar evolution models predict that during the core collapse of massive stars, a considerable amount of the stellar material will fall back onto the compact, collapsed remnants (neutron stars or black holes), usually in the form of an accretion disk. This triggers rapid mass accretion onto, e.g., the black hole, and produces energetic explosions known as Gamma-ray bursts. However it i...