Observational Effects of Strong Gravity in Vicinity of Supermassive Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper models the emission of accretion disks around supermassive black holes in AGN using ray-tracing in Kerr metric, analyzing iron line profiles to observe strong gravity effects and infer spacetime geometry near black holes.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical simulation method for accretion disk emission in Kerr spacetime and compares modeled and observed iron line profiles to study strong gravity effects.

Findings

Modeling shows the Fe Kα line profile depends on emission region parameters.

Comparison with observations helps determine black hole spacetime geometry.

Results provide insights into plasma conditions near supermassive black holes.

Abstract

Here we discuss the effects of strong gravity that can be observed in electromagnetic spectra of active galactic nuclei (AGN). According to the unification model of an AGN, there is a supermassive black hole ($10^7 - 10^9 M_\odot$) in its center, surrounded by an accretion disk that radiates in the X-ray band. Accretion disks could have different forms, dimensions, and emission, depending on the type of central black hole (BH), whether it is rotating (Kerr metric) or nonrotating (Schwarzschild metric). We modeled the emission of an accretion disk around supermassive BH using numerical simulations based on a ray-tracing method in the Kerr metric. A broad emission line Fe K$\alpha$ at 6.4 keV with asymmetric profile (narrow bright blue peak and a wide faint red wing) has been observed in a number of type 1 AGN. The effects of strong gravitational field are investigated by comparison between the modeled and observed iron K$\alpha$ line profiles. The results of our modeling show that the parameters of the Fe K$\alpha$ line emitting region have significant influence on the line profile and thus, allow us to determine the space-time geometry (metric) in vicinity of the central BH of AGN, and also can give us information about the plasma conditions in these regions.