2017/02/07 by Fukumura, Keigo, Kazanas, Demosthenes, Shrader, Chris +3 · 5 citations
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1702.02197
Black hole accretion disks appear to produce invariably plasma outflows that result in blue-shifted absorption features in their spectra. The X-ray absorption-line properties of these outflows are quite diverse, ranging in velocity from non-relativistic (∼ 300 km/sec) to sub-relativistic (∼ 0.1c where c is the speed of light) and a similarly broad range in the ionization states of the wind plasma. We report here that semi-analytic, self-similar magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) wind models that have successfully accounted for the X-ray absorber properties of supermassive black holes, also fit well the high-resolution X-ray spectrum of the accreting stellar-mass black hole, GRO J1655-40. This provides an explicit theoretical argument of their MHD origin (aligned with earlier observational claims) and supports the notion of a universal magnetic structure of the observed winds across all known black hole sizes.