A Wind-disk Self-irradiation Model for Supercritical Accretion

Abstract

Optical emission from actively accreting X-ray binaries is dominated by X-ray reprocessing on the outer disk. In the regime of supercritical accretion, strong radiation will power a massive wind that is optically thick and nearly spherical, and will occult the central hard X-rays from irradiating the outer disk. Instead, thermal emission from the wind will act as a new source of irradiation. Here, we construct a self-irradiation model in which the inner disk (within the wind photosphere) is completely blocked by the wind, the middle part (between the wind photosphere and scattersphere) is heated by the wind directly, and the outer disk (beyond the wind scattersphere) is heated by photons leaving the scattersphere. The model can adequately fit the UV/optical SED of NGC 247 X-1, a candidate source with supercritical accretion, while the standard irradiation model fails to produce a self-consistent result. The best-fit parameters suggest that the source contains a stellar-mass black hole with an accretion rate roughly 100 times the critical value. Remarkably, the UV/optical fitting predicts a wind photosphere that is consistent with X-ray measurements, although it is an extrapolation over three orders of magnitude in wavelength. This implies that supercritical accretion does power a massive wind and the UV/optical data are useful for constraining the wind structure.

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