Accretion Disk Spectra of Super-Luminal Jet Sources and Ultra-Luminous Compact X-Ray Sources in Nearby Spiral Galaxies

Abstract

The Ultra-luminous Compact X-ray Sources (ULXs) in nearby spiral galaxies and the Galactic super-luminal jet sources share the common spectral characteristic that they have extremely high disk temperatures which cannot be explained in the framework of the standard accretion disk model in the Schwarzschild metric. We have calculated an extreme Kerr disk model to examine if the Kerr disk model can instead explain the observed ‘too hot’ accretion disk spectra. We found that the Kerr disk spectrum becomes significantly harder compared to the Schwarzschild disk only when the disk is highly inclined. For super-luminal jet sources, which are known to be inclined systems, the Kerr disk model may thus work if we choose proper values for the black hole angular momentum. For the ULXs, however, the Kerr disk interpretation will be problematic, as is is highly unlikely that their accretion disks are preferentially inclined.

also Universities Space Research Association