ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

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

102   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Adam Ingram Dr
 تاريخ النشر 2019
  مجال البحث فيزياء
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

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 $sim14-26$ million $M_odot$).

قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

Accreting black holes show characteristic reflection features in their X-ray spectrum, including an iron K$alpha$ line, resulting from hard X-ray continuum photons illuminating the accretion disk. The reverberation lag resulting from the path length difference between direct and reflected emission provides a powerful tool to probe the innermost regions around both stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. Here, we present for the first time a reverberation mapping formalism that enables modeling of energy dependent time lags and variability amplitude for a wide range of variability timescales, taking the complete information of the cross-spectrum into account. We use a pivoting power-law model to account for the spectral variability of the continuum that dominates over the reverberation lags for longer time scale variability. We use an analytic approximation to self-consistently account for the non-linear effects caused by this continuum spectral variability, which have been ignored by all previous reverberation studies. We find that ignoring these non-linear effects can bias measurements of the reverberation lags, particularly at low frequencies. Since our model is analytic, we are able to fit simultaneously for a wide range of Fourier frequencies without prohibitive computational expense. We also introduce a formalism of fitting to real and imaginary parts of our cross-spectrum statistic, which naturally avoids some mistakes/inaccuracies previously common in the literature. We perform proof-of-principle fits to Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer data of Cygnus X-1.
Luminous accreting stellar mass and supermassive black holes produce power-law continuum X-ray emission from a compact central corona. Reverberation time lags occur due to light travel time-delays between changes in the direct coronal emission and co rresponding variations in its reflection from the accretion flow. Reverberation is detectable using light curves made in different X-ray energy bands, since the direct and reflected components have different spectral shapes. Larger, lower frequency, lags are also seen and are identified with propagation of fluctuations through the accretion flow and associated corona. We review the evidence for X-ray reverberation in active galactic nuclei and black hole X-ray binaries, showing how it can be best measured and how it may be modelled. The timescales and energy-dependence of the high frequency reverberation lags show that much of the signal is originating from very close to the black hole in some objects, within a few gravitational radii of the event horizon. We consider how these signals can be studied in the future to carry out X-ray reverberation mapping of the regions closest to black holes.
We discuss a model of an X-ray illuminating source above an accretion disk of a rotating black hole. Within the so called lamp-post scheme we compute the expected (observed) polarization properties of the radiation reaching an observer. We explore th e dependencies on model parameters, employing Monte Carlo radiation transfer computations of the X-ray reflection on the accretion disk and taking general relativity effects into account. In particular, we discuss the role of the black hole spin, of the observer viewing angle, and of the primary X-ray source distance from the black hole. We give several examples of the resulting polarization degree for two types of exemplary objects - active galactic nuclei and Galactic black holes. In order to assess potential observability of the polarization features, we assume the sensitivity of the proposed New Hard X-ray Mission (NHXM). We examine the energy range from several keV to ~50 keV, so the iron-line complex and the Compton hump are included in our model spectra. We find the resultant polarization degree to increase at the higher end of the studied energy band, i.e. at >~20 keV. Thus, the best results for polarimetry of reflection spectra should be achieved at the Compton hump energy region. We also obtain higher polarization degree for large spin values of the black hole, small heights of the primary source, and low inclination angles of the observer.
208 - Daichi Tsuna , Norita Kawanaka , 2018
Detectability of isolated black holes (IBHs) without a companion star but emitting X-rays by accretion from dense interstellar medium (ISM) or molecular cloud gas is investigated. We calculate orbits of IBHs in the Galaxy to derive a realistic spatia l distribution of IBHs, for various mean values of kick velocity at their birth $upsilon_{rm avg}$. X-ray luminosities of these IBHs are then calculated considering various phases of ISM and molecular clouds, for a wide range of the accretion efficiency $lambda$ (a ratio of the actual accretion rate to the Bondi rate) that is rather uncertain. It is found that detectable IBHs mostly reside near the Galactic Centre (GC), and hence taking the Galactic structure into account is essential. In the hard X-ray band, where identification of IBHs from other contaminating X-ray sources may be easier, the expected number of IBHs detectable by the past survey by NuSTAR towards GC is at most order unity. However, 30--100 IBHs may be detected by the future survey by FORCE with an optimistic parameter set of $upsilon_{rm avg} = 50 mathrm{km s^{-1}}$ and $lambda = 0.1$, implying that it may be possible to detect IBHs or constrain the model parameters.
In this work we have developed a new stochastic model for the fluctuations in lightcurves of accreting black holes. The model is based on a linear combination of stochastic processes and is also the solution to the linear diffusion equation perturbed by a spatially correlated noise field. This allows flexible modeling of the power spectral density (PSD), and we derive the likelihood function for the process, enabling one to estimate the parameters of the process, including break frequencies in the PSD. Our statistical technique is computationally efficient, unbiased by aliasing and red noise leak, and fully accounts for irregular sampling and measurement errors. We show that our stochastic model provides a good approximation to the X-ray lightcurves of galactic black holes, and the optical and X-ray lightcurves of AGN. We use the estimated time scales of our stochastic model to recover the correlation between characteristic time scale of the high frequency X-ray fluctuations and black hole mass for AGN, including two new `detections of the time scale for Fairall 9 and NGC 5548. We find a tight anti-correlation between the black hole mass and the amplitude of the driving noise field, which is proportional to the amplitude of the high frequency X-ray PSD, and we estimate that this parameter gives black hole mass estimates to within ~ 0.2 dex precision, potentially the most accurate method for AGN yet. We also find evidence that ~ 13% of AGN optical PSDs fall off flatter than 1 / f^2, and, similar to previous work, find that the optical fluctuations are more suppressed on short time scales compared to the X-rays, but are larger on long time scales, suggesting the optical fluctuations are not solely due to reprocessing of X-rays.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا