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Session 8 - Relativistic Astrophysics.
Display session, Wednesday, January 07
Exhibit Hall,
Making the reasonable assumptions that the innermost part of an accretion disk around a black hole is unstable and clumpy and that it is illuminated by X-ray sources originating above it, we model the X-ray variability induced by the clumpy matter moving relativistically around the black hole. Apart from providing a general study of this class of variability model, these simulations include double gravitational bending effects: both the paths of the photons from the X-ray sources falling onto the disk and the paths of outgoing photons reflected by the clumpy region of the accretion disk are affected, but the former effect has not been considered previously. Various emission-laws for the incident X-ray sources are investigated. It is found that if the primary source emits a power-law spectrum then the unity temporal coherence between different X-ray bands recently observed in the Galactic black hole candidates GX 339-4 and Cyg X-1 can be produced. This work was supported in part by NASA grant NAG 5-3098.
