Bondi on spherically symmetric accretion

Hermann Bondi’s 1952 paper “On spherically symmetrical accretion” is recognized as one of the foundations of accretion theory. Although Bondi later remarked that it was “not much more than an examination exercise”, his mathematical analysis of spherical accretion on to a point mass has found broad use across fields of astrophysics that were embryonic or non-existent at the time of the paper’s publication. In this non-technical review, I describe the motivations for Bondi’s work, and briefly discuss some of the applications of Bondi accretion in high energy astrophysics, galaxy formation, and star formation.