Hoyle-Lyttleton type accretion is investigated, by taking account of not only the effect of radiation pressure but the effect of radiation drag. We calculate the trajectories of particles for three cases: only the effect of gravity is considered (case A); the effect of radiation pressure is taken into account (case B); the effect of radiation drag as well as radiation pressure is taken into acc...

Radiation pressure from the absorption and scattering of starlight by dust grains may be a crucial feedback mechanism in starburst galaxies and the self-gravitating parsec-scale disks that accompany the fueling of active galactic nuclei. I review the case for radiation pressure in both optically-thin and highly optically-thick contexts. I describe the conditions for which Eddington-limited star...

The name of Poynting is universally recognized for his development of the well-known expression for the flow of electromagnetic energy. Not so well known is Poynting's series of papers on radiation pressure, with 2011 marking the centenary of the last of his 15 publications on this topic. This paper reviews and assesses his radiation-pressure work, with a level of coverage aimed at the reader f...

When the accretion rate is more than a small fraction of Eddington, the inner regions of accretion disks around black holes are expected to be radiation-dominated. However, in the α-model, these regions are also expected to be thermally unstable. In this paper, we report two 3-d radiation MHD simulations of a vertically-stratified shearing box in which the ratio of radiation to gas pressure is ...

We present accurate Monte-Carlo calculations of Lyα radiation pressure in a range of models which represent galaxies during various epochs of our Universe. We show that the radiation force that Lyα photons exert on hydrogen gas in the neutral intergalactic medium (IGM), that surrounds minihalos that host the first stars, may exceed gravity by orders of magnitude and drive supersonic winds. Lyα ...

Multi-epoch reverberation mapping of the Seyfert galaxy, NGC 5548, suggests that radiation pressure is not strongly biasing the black hole (BH) masses derived for active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The model proposed by Marconi et al. to account for radiation pressure in BH mass estimates fails to explain the observations of NGC 5548, the only AGN with reverberation campaigns spanning a sufficientl...