A public relativistic transfer function model for X-ray reverberation mapping of accreting black holes

Abstract

We present the publicly available model \textsc{reltrans} that calculates the light-crossing delays and energy shifts experienced by X-ray photons originally emitted close to the black hole when they reflect from the accretion disk and are scattered into our line-of-sight, accounting for all general relativistic effects. Our model is fast and flexible enough to be simultaneously fit to the observed energy-dependent cross-spectrum for a large range of Fourier frequencies, as well as to the time-averaged spectrum. This not only enables better geometric constraints than only modelling the relativistically broadened reflection features in the time-averaged spectrum, but additionally enables constraints on the mass of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei and stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We include a self-consistently calculated radial profile of the disk ionization parameter and properly account for the effect that the telescope response has on the predicted time lags. We find that a number of previous spectral analyses have measured artificially low source heights due to not accounting for the former effect and that timing analyses have been affected by the latter. In particular, the magnitude of the soft lags in active galactic nuclei may have been under-estimated, and the magnitude of lags attributed to thermal reverberation in X-ray binaries may have been over-estimated. We fit \textsc{reltrans} to the lag-energy spectrum of the Seyfert galaxy Mrk 335, resulting in a best fitting black hole mass that is smaller than previous optical reverberation measurements ($\sim 7$ million compared with $\sim 14-26$ million $M_{\odot }$).

Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 24 pages, 17 figures. Model available to download from https://adingram.bitbucket.io/reltrans.html

References in corpus (24)

• Modelling the behaviour of accretion flows in X-ray binaries
• X-ray reverberation around accreting black holes
• Relativistic X-ray Lines from the Inner Accretion Disks Around Black Holes
• The role of the reflection fraction in constraining black hole spin
• A quasi-periodic modulation of the iron line centroid energy in the black hole binary H 1743-322
• An absorption origin for the X-ray spectral variability of MCG-6-30-15
• The NuSTAR spectrum of Mrk 335: Extreme relativistic effects within 2 gravitational radii of the event horizon?
• The mass function of GX 339-4 from spectroscopic observations of its donor star
• Tomographic reflection modelling of quasi-periodic oscillations in the black hole binary H 1743-322
• Revealing accretion onto black holes: X-ray reflection throughout three outbursts of GX 339-4
• Reflection Spectra of the Black Hole Binary Candidate MAXI J1535-571 in the Hard State Observed by NuSTAR
• Phase-resolved spectroscopy of low frequency quasi-periodic oscillations in GRS 1915+105
• Evolution of the reverberation lag in GX 339-4 at the end of an outburst
• Multi-timescale X-ray reverberation mapping of accreting black holes
• Can the soft excess in AGN originate from disc reflection?
• Propagating mass accretion rate fluctuations in X-ray binaries under the influence of viscous diffusion
• Investigating the X-ray time-lags in PG 1244+026 using an extended corona model
• Modelling hard and soft state of Cygnus X-1 with propagating mass accretion rate fluctuations
• Theoretical modelling of the AGN iron-line vs continuum time-lags in the lamp-post geometry
• Modelling the cross-spectral variability of the black hole binary MAXI J1659-152 with propagating accretion rate fluctuations
• Simultaneous spectral and reverberation modelling of relativistic reflection in Mrk 335
• The Compton hump and variable blue wing in the extreme low-flux NuSTAR observations of 1H0707-495
• The reflection spectrum of the low-mass X-ray binary 4U 1636-53
• The X-ray continuum time-lags and intrinsic coherence in AGN

Cited by in corpus (1)

• An X-ray reverberation mass measurement of Cygnus X-1