Accretion Disk Illumination in Schwarzschild and Kerr Geometries: Fitting Formulae

Abstract

We describe the methodology and compute the illumination of geometrically thin accretion disks around black holes of arbitrary spin parameter $a$ exposed to the radiation of a point-like, isotropic source at arbitrary height above the disk on its symmetry axis. We then provide analytic fitting formulae for the illumination as a function of the source height $h$ and the black hole angular momentum $a$. We find that for a source on the disk symmetry axis and $h/M>3$, the main effect of the parameter $a$ is allowing the disk to extend to smaller radii (approaching $r/M\to 1$ as $a/M\to 1$) and thus allow the illumination of regions of much higher rotational velocity and redshift. We also compute the illumination profiles for anisotropic emission associated with the motion of the source relative to the accretion disk and present the fractions of photons absorbed by the black hole, intercepted by the disk or escaping to infinity for both isotropic and anisotropic emission for $a/M=0$ and $a/M=0.99$. As the anisotropy (of a source approaching the disk) increases the illumination profile reduces (approximately) to a single power-law, whose index, $q$, because of absorption of the beamed photons by the black hole, saturates to a value no higher than $q\gtrsim 3$. Finally, we compute the fluorescence Fe line profiles associated with the specific illumination and compare them among various cases.

26 pages, 21 b/w figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal as of 4/16/2007

References in corpus (4)

• Constraining Black Hole Spin Via X-ray Spectroscopy
• Suzaku observations of the hard X-ray variability of MCG-6-30-15: the effects of strong gravity around a Kerr black hole
• Suzaku Observations of Iron Lines and Reflection in AGN
• Magnetohydrodynamic Shocks in Non-Equatorial Plasma Flows around a Black Hole

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