Broad Iron Lines in AGN and X-ray Binaries

Abstract

Several AGN and black hole X-ray binaries show a clear very broad iron line which is strong evidence that the black holes are rapidly spinning. Detailed analysis of these objects shows that the emission line is not significantly affected by absorption and that the source variability is principally due to variation in amplitude of a power-law. Underlying this is a much less variable, relativistically-smeared, reflection-dominated, component which carries the imprint of strong gravity at a few gravitational radii. The strong gravitational light bending in these regions then explains the power-law variability as due to changes in height of the primary X-ray source above the disc. The reflection component, in particular its variability and the profile of the iron line, enables us to study the innermost regions around an accreting, spinning, black hole.

10 pages, 15 figures, to appear in From X-ray Binaries to Quasars: Black Hole Accretion on All Mass Scales, ed. T. J. Maccarone, R. P. Fender, and L. C. Ho (Dordrecht: Kluwer), breaks now corrected

References in corpus (17)

• A light bending model for the X-ray temporal and spectral properties of accreting black holes
• A long hard look at MCG-6-30-15 with XMM-Newton
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• An XMM-Newton observation of Ark 120: the X-ray spectrum of a `bare' Seyfert 1 nucleus
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• Sgr A${}^{\ast }$: a laboratory to measure the central black hole and cluster parameters
• Comment on the Black Hole Recoil Candidate Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0
• Peering into the central region of a nano-quasar: XMM-Newton and Chandra views of the CH Cyg Symbiotic System
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