Line emission from an accretion disk around a black hole: effects of disk structure

摘要

The observed iron Kα fluorescence lines in Seyfert I galaxies provide strong evidence for an accretion disk near a supermassive black hole as a source of the line emission. These lines serve as powerful probes for examining the structure of inner regions of accretion disks. Previous studies of line emission have considered only geometrically thin disks, where the gas moves along geodesics in the equatorial plane of a black hole. Here we extend this work to consider the effects on line profiles from finite disk thickness, radial accretion flow, and turbulence. We adopt the Novikov-Thorne α-disk model and find that within this framework turbulent broadening is the dominant new effect.