Irradiation of accretion discs in active galactic nuclei due to warm absorber

Abstract

The presence of the warm absorber of considerable optical depth is seen in many AGN. We show that this medium may affect significantly the optical/UV spectrum of an AGN by backscattering a fraction of the total radiation flux towards the disc surface. We consider in detail the case when the disk extends down to a marginally stable orbit, all the emission comes from the disk surface and the scattering medium forms a cone around the symmetry axis. Disc irradiation results in much flatter optical/UV continuum than predicted by standard disc models. The effect depends both on the total optical depth of the warm absorber and on the specific density distribution of this medium so the analysis of the optical/UV continuum allows to obtain constraints for the warm absorber complementary to those obtained from the soft X-ray data analysis. We give results for two exemplary sources - RE J1034+396 and PG1211+143, and for the bluest composite quasar spectrum of Richards et al. obtained from SDSS.

arXiv commentaccepted for publication in MNRAS

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