AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 52. Stellar Disks and their Owners
Oral, Thursday, January 7, 1999, 10:00-11:00am, Room 9 (C)

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[52.07] Structure and Spectra of Transonic Black Hole Accretion Disks

E. P. Liang, D. Lin (Rice University)

Using the transonic boundary condition for the radial drift of an accretion disk around a black hole, we have constructed global disk solutions from first principles that are optically thick at large radii and optically thin near the horizon. Such solutions have the potential of explaining the different spectral states of Galactic black holes. In this paper we concentrate on the physical mechanisms that can (a) sharpen the transition zone (b) thermally stabilize the optically thin inner diak. We will compute sample global spectral output of such transonic disk solutions and compare them with observational data.


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