2011-02-11

Rafikov

This afternoon Roman Rafikov (Princeton) gave a nice talk about metallicity anomalies in white dwarfs, with a probable connection to accretion from dust or proto-planetary-like disks. It was all good, but the result I will take to the grave was about accretion induced by Poynting–Robertson drag: Because it is a pure special-relativity effect, the mass accretion rate (mass per unit time) is just the intercepted luminosity (energy per unit time) divided by two factors of the speed of light. That is, it is a perfect converter of energy into mass!

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