The Bright Side of Black Holes: Radiation From Black Hole Accretion Disks

Abstract

An understanding of radiation is paramount for connecting observations of accretion disks with the theory of black holes. In this thesis, we explore via radiative transfer postprocessing calculations the observational signatures of black holes. We investigate disk spectra by analyzing general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of accretion disks. For the most part there are no surprises -- the resulting GRMHD spectrum is very close to the analytic Novikov & Thorne (1973) prediction from decades past, except for a small modification in the case of spinning black holes, which exhibit a high-energy power-law tail that is sourced by hot Comptonized gas from within the plunging region of the accretion flow. These conclusions are borne out by both 1D and 3D radiative transfer calculations of the disk. Significant effort was spent in developing from scratch the 3D radiative code that we used for the analysis. The code is named HERO (Hybrid Evaluator for Radiative Objects) and it is a new general purpose grid-based 3D general relativistic radiative solver.