Relativistic slim disks with vertical structure

¹ Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences, Bartycka 18, 00-716 Warszawa, Poland
e-mail: as@camk.edu.pl; wlodek@camk.edu.pl; agata@camk.edu.pl
² Department of Physics, Göteborg University, 412-96 Göteborg, Sweden
e-mail: Marek.Abramowicz@physics.gu.se
³ Astronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Bočni II/1401a, 141-31 Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: bursa@astro.cas.cz
⁴ Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, UMR 7095 CNRS, UPMC Univ. Paris 06, 98bis Bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France
e-mail: lasota@iap.fr
⁵ Jagiellonian University Observatory, ul. Orla 171, 30-244 Kraków, Poland

Received: 22 June 2010
Accepted: 6 November 2010

Abstract

We report on a scheme for incorporating vertical radiative energy transport into a fully relativistic, Kerr-metric model of optically thick, advective, transonic alpha disks. Our code couples the radial and vertical equations of the accretion disk. The flux was computed in the diffusion approximation, and convection is included in the mixing-length approximation. We present the detailed structure of this “two-dimensional” slim-disk model for α = 0.01. We then calculated the emergent spectra integrated over the disk surface. The values of surface density, radial velocity, and the photospheric height for these models differ by 20%–30% from those obtained in the polytropic, height-averaged slim disk model considered previously. However, the emission profiles and the resulting spectra are quite similar for both types of models. The effective optical depth of the slim disk becomes lower than unity for high values of the alpha parameter and for high accretion rates.