Bounds on the inner radius of emission around supermassive black holes

Details Bounds on the inner radius of emission around supermassive black holes Bounds on the inner radius of emission around supermassive black holes

Apr 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998aipc..431..269b&link_type=abstract

Accretion processes in astrophysical systems: Some like it hot! - eigth astrophysics conference. AIP Conference Proceedings, Vo

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Galactic Nuclei, Circumnuclear Matter, And Bulges, Radiation Mechanisms, Polarization, Active And Peculiar Galaxies And Related Systems

Scientific paper

Observations of iron K-alpha fluorescence lines in Seyfert galaxies provide strong evidence for an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole as the source of the line emission. Here we consider a diagnostic of a disk line profile, based on the minimum and maximum frequency of emission, to robustly constrain the inner radius of the disk. This diagnostic is applied to spectra from Seyfert I galaxies (Iwasawa et al. 1996 [1] Nandra et al. 1997 [2]), and a composite Seyfert II spectrum (Turner et al. 1997 [3]). We are able to place firm bounds on the inner radius of emission from the bright nucleus in MCG-6-30-15 we find that the disk extends to within 6.2 Rg of the central black hole, independent of inclination angle (Rg is GM/c2 for a black hole of mass M). With inclination angle constraints-we find 29+/-5° from frequency extrema of the [1] data-the inner radius bounded by 5.2+/-0.6 Rg. The frequency extrema of composite Seyfert I and II spectra both show inner radii below about 20 Rg and are consistent with modest inclination angles (i<45 degrees). Hence, at the present noise level, the data do not support Seyfert unification models based on orientation effects.

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