A Wind-Disk Self-Irradiation Model For Supercritical Accretion

TL;DR

This paper develops a self-irradiation model for supercritical accretion disks with massive winds, successfully fitting UV/optical data of NGC 247 X-1 and revealing insights into wind structure and accretion rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel wind-disk self-irradiation model that accounts for wind effects, improving fits to observational data over standard models.

Findings

The model fits the UV/optical SED of NGC 247 X-1 successfully.

The source likely contains a stellar mass black hole with ~100 times critical accretion rate.

Predicted wind photosphere aligns with X-ray measurements, supporting the supercritical accretion scenario.

Abstract

Optical emission from actively accreting X-ray binaries is dominated by X-ray reprocessing on the outer disk. In the regime of supercritical accretion, strong radiation will power a massive wind that is optically thick and nearly spherical, and will occult the central hard X-rays from irradiating the outer disk. Instead, thermal emission from the wind will act as a new source of irradiation. Here, we construct a self-irradiation model, in which the inner disk (within the wind photosphere) is completely blocked by the wind, the middle part (between the wind photosphere and scattersphere) is heated by the wind directly, and the outer disk (beyond the wind scattersphere) is heated by photons leaving the scattersphere. The model can adequately fit the UV/optical SED of NGC 247 X-1, a candidate source with supercritical accretion, while the standard irradiation model fails to produce a self-consistent result. The best-fit parameters suggest that the source contains a stellar mass black hole with an accretion rate roughly 100 times the critical value. Remarkably, the UV/optical fitting predicts a wind photosphere that is well consistent with X-ray measurements, although it is an extrapolation over 3 orders of magnitude in wavelength. This implies that supercritical accretion does power a massive wind and the UV/optical data are useful in constraining the wind structure.