Does fusion occur in black hole accretion discs?

Factual Questions
1

SSIA.

Rob

2

I’m pretty sure not. The gas looks compressed only as seen from a remote viewer because of the perceived time compression. From the perspective of the gas, it’s just falling smoothly into that big black thing.

3

It’s not smooth: If it were, we wouldn’t see it at all. We see it because all of the infalling gas is interacting with all the other infalling gas, and heating up. The energies involved are, at least potentially, tremendous: Matter falling into a black hole can release up to half of its mass as radiant energy. In practice, of course, efficiencies are much lower than that, but even low efficiencies leave tremendous energies. Heck, you can get fusion just from accretion onto a neutron star, and that’s not nearly as deep into the gravitational well.

4

Apparently it can, if this presentation is correct;
http://www.lsw.uni-heidelberg.de/nic2010/talks/McLaughlin.pdf

although at first viewing I can’t quite follow the reasoning.