Three-Layered Atmospheric Structure in Accretion Disks Around Stellar-Mass Black Holes
S. N. Zhang,
12*
Wei Cui,
3
Wan Chen,
45
Yangsen Yao,
1
Xiaoling Zhang,
1
Xuejun Sun,
1
Xue-Bing Wu,
6
Haiguang Xu
7
Modeling of the x-ray spectra of the Galactic superluminal jet
sources GRS 1915+105 and GRO J1655-40 reveals a three-layered atmospheric structure in the inner region of their accretion disks. Above the cold and optically thick disk with a temperature of 0.2 to
0.5 kiloelectron volts, there is a warm layer with a temperature of 1.0 to 1.5 kiloelectron volts and an optical depth around 10. Sometimes
there is also a much hotter, optically thin corona above the warm
layer, with a temperature of 100 kiloelectron volts or higher and an
optical depth around unity. The structural similarity between the
accretion disks and the solar atmosphere suggests that similar physical
processes may be operating in these different systems.
1 Physics Department, University of Alabama in
Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA.
2 Space
Sciences Laboratory, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, SD50,
Huntsville, AL 35812, USA.
3 Center for Space
Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
4 Department of Astronomy, University of
Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
5 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 661, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA.
6 Beijing Astronomical
Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100012, People's
Republic of China.
7 Institute for Space and
Astrophysics, Department of Applied Physics, Shanghai Jiao-Tong
University, Shanghai 200030, People's Republic of China.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
zhangsn{at}email.uah.edu
