Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1998-02-11
Astrophys.J. 496 (1998) L105-L108
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
accepted for publication in ApJ Letters
Scientific paper
10.1086/311260
A fraction of the radiation produced by an accretion disk may be Thomson scattered by a wind flowing away from the disk. Employing a simple plane-parallel model of the wind, we calculate the polarization of the scattered radiation and find that its sign depends on the wind velocity, beta=v/c. In the case, 0.12 < beta < 0.78, the polarization is parallel to the disk normal, i.e., it is orthogonal to the standard Chandrasekhar's polarization expected from accretion disks. The velocity of an electron-positron wind is likely to saturate near the equilibrium value beta_* of order 0.5 for which the accelerating radiation pressure is balanced by the Compton drag. Then the change of polarization by the wind is most pronounced. This may help to reconcile the standard accretion disk model with the optical polarimetric observations of non-blazar AGNs.
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