Observational Appearance of Relativistic, Spherically Symmetric Massive Winds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how relativistic, spherically symmetric winds affect the observed appearance, temperature, and luminosity of astrophysical objects, revealing significant modifications due to relativistic effects.

Contribution

It extends previous work by calculating the temperature distribution and luminosity of relativistic winds' photospheres in both frames, highlighting the impact on observed properties.

Findings

Photosphere shape becomes concave at relativistic speeds.

Luminosity increases with wind speed due to relativistic effects.

Relativistic winds cause strong modifications to limb-darkening and observed brightness.

Abstract

The photon mean free path in a relativistically moving medium becomes long in the down-stream direction while short in the up-stream direction. As a result, the observed optical depth $\tau$ becomes small in the downstream direction while large in the upstream direction. Hence, if a relativistic spherical wind blows off, the optical depth depends strongly on its speed and the angle between the velocity and the line-of-sight. Abramowicz et al. (1991) examined such a relativistic wind, and found that the shape of the photosphere at $\tau=1$ appears convex in the non-relativistic case, but concave for relativistic velocities. We further calculated the temperature distribution and luminosity of the photosphere both in the comoving and inertial frames. We found that the limb-darkening effect would strongly modified in the relativistic regime. We also found that luminosities of the photosphere becomes large as the wind speed increases due to the relativistic effects. In addition, the luminosity in the inertial frame is higher than that in the comoving frame. These results suggest that the observed temperature and brightness in luminous objects may be overestimated when there are strong relativistic winds.