Abstract
Accretion is a fundamental source of energy in astrophysics, powering disks in systems ranging from moons to low-mass stellar binaries to disks around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Accretion is challenging to model accurately from first principles, making numerical simulations a key tool in investigating turbulent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) fluctuations driven by the magneto-rotational instability (MRI). Resolving the critical length scale associated with this instability is essential to capturing its growth and dynamics. In this work, we utilize the multi physics code FLASH to model accretion disks in idealized two-dimensional simulations and adaptively refine our simulation domain using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), based upon resolution of the MRI. We then compare the AMR simulations to simulations which uniformly resolve the computational domain everywhere, and thereby showcase the possible computational savings of utilizing AMR in future MRI simulations.