Investigating the consistency of the shape and flux of X-ray reflection spectra in the hard state with an accretion disk reaching close to the black hole
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The observed spectra from black hole (BH) X-ray binaries (XRBs) typically consist of two primary components. A multitemperature blackbody originating from the accretion disk in the soft X-ray, and a power law-like component in the hard X-ray, due to the Comptonization of soft photons by the hot corona. The illumination of the disk by the corona gives rise to another key component known as reflection. A fraction of the incident hard X-ray radiation is naturally absorbed and re-emitted as a blackbody at lower energies and referred to as the "reprocessed blackbody". Our fitting of the representative observation of the BH XRB low/hard state suggests that the disk may, in principle, extend very close to the BH, even though the reprocessed thermal emission (due to disk illumination) remains cold (and thus low) enough to be consistent with the data in contrast to the results of a previous study. The inner reflection component is highly ionized and its fit is primarily driven by its contribution to the continuum, rather than by the shape of the relativistic iron line.
Author: Datta, Sudeb Ranjan
Institution: Czech Academy of Sciences, Astronomical Institute
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6967852795
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