Line shifts in accretion disks - the case of Fe K$\alpha$

TL;DR

This paper investigates how various relativistic and dynamical effects influence the observed broad Fe Kα line profiles from accretion disks around single and binary supermassive black holes, using numerical ray-tracing simulations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multiple effects affecting Fe Kα line profiles, including relativistic Doppler shifts, gravitational redshift, and binary system dynamics, through detailed simulations.

Findings

All studied effects significantly influence Fe Kα line profiles.

Relativistic Doppler and gravitational redshift alter line shape and position.

Binary black hole dynamics can cause observable shifts in line profiles.

Abstract

Here we present a short overview and main results of our investigations of several effects which can induce shifts in the broad Fe K$\alpha$ line emitted from relativistic accretion disks around single and binary supermassive black holes. We used numerical simulations based on ray-tracing method in the Kerr metric to study the role of classical Doppler shift, special relativistic transverse Doppler shift and Doppler beaming, general relativistic gravitational redshift, and perturbations of the disk emissivity in the formation of the observed Fe K$\alpha$ line profiles. Besides, we also investigated whether the observed line profiles from the binary systems of supermassive black holes could be affected by the Doppler shifts due to dynamics of such systems. The presented results demonstrate that all these effects could have a significant influence on the observed profiles of the broad Fe K$\alpha$ line emitted from relativistic accretion disks around single and binary supermassive black holes.