A new equilibrium for accretion disks around black holes

Accretion disks around black holes in which the shear stress is proportional to the total pressure, the accretion rate is more than a small fraction of Eddington, and the matter is distributed smoothly are both thermally and viscously unstable in their inner portions. The nonlinear end state of these instabilities is uncertain. Here a new inhomogeneous equilibrium is proposed that is both thermally and viscously stable. In this equilibrium, the majority of the mass is in dense clumps, while a minority reaches temperatures similar to 10(9) K. The requirements of dynamical and thermal equilibrium completely determine the parameters of this system, and these are found to be in good agreement with the parameters derived from observations of accreting black holes, both in active galactic nuclei and in stellar binary systems.