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Probe of Strong Gravity: Polarized X-Ray Emission from the Corona-Disk System of Black Hole

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Abstract

X-ray continuum emission from AGNs originates from their coronae and accretion disks. When a black hole accretes the surrounding gas at the super-Eddington accretion rate, its disk becomes thick enough to shadow the corona and the inner part of itself. In this paper, we study the flux and polarization properties of the X-ray emission from the geometrically thick and optically thick disks. It is found that at the high inclination, the shadowing effect makes the corona invisible and the X-ray emission faint, but the polarization degree (PD) of the X-ray emission becomes large significantly. Therefore, the polarization properties of the X-ray emission can be used to identify the existence of the invisible coronae.

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Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 11725312, 11421303).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Z. Y. Tang & Y. F. Yuan

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  1. Z. Y. Tang
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  2. Y. F. Yuan
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Correspondence to Y. F. Yuan.

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Paper presented at the Fourth Zeldovich meeting, an international conference in honor of Ya.B. Zeldovich held in Minsk, Belarus, on September 7–11, 2020. Published by the recommendation of the special editors: S.Ya. Kilin, R. Ruffini, and G.V. Vereshchagin.

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Tang, Z.Y., Yuan, Y.F. Probe of Strong Gravity: Polarized X-Ray Emission from the Corona-Disk System of Black Hole. Astron. Rep. 65, 1062–1067 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063772921100395

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063772921100395

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