Abstract:
When an accretion disk falls prey to the runaway instability, a large portion of its
mass is devoured by the black hole within a few dynamical times. Despite decades of
effort, it is still unclear under what conditions such an instability can occur. The technically most advanced relativistic simulations to date were unable to find a clear sign
for the onset of the instability. In this work, we present three-dimensional relativistic
hydrodynamics simulations of accretion disks around black holes in dynamical
spacetime. We focus on the configurations that are expected to be particularly prone
to the development of this instability.We demonstrate, for the first time, that the fully
self-consistent general relativistic evolution does indeed produce a runaway instability.
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