How to constrain mass and spin of supermassive black holes through their disk emission

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica “G. Occhialini”, Università di Milano – Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 3, 20126 Milano, Italy
e-mail: sam.campitiello@gmail.com
² INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, via E. Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate, Italy
³ INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, via Tiepolo 11, 34131 Trieste, Italy

Received: 5 September 2017
Accepted: 19 November 2017

Abstract

We investigate the global properties of the radiation emitted by the accretion disk around Kerr black holes. Using the Kerr blackbody numerical model, we build an analytic approximation of the disk emission features focusing on the pattern of the produced radiation as a function of the black hole spin, mass, accretion rate and viewing angle. The assumption of having a geometrically thin disk limits our analysis to systems emitting below ~0.3 of the Eddington luminosity. We apply this analytical model to four blazars (whose jets are pointing at us) at high redshift that show clear signatures of disk emission. For them, we derive the black hole masses as a function of spin. If these jetted sources are powered by the black hole rotation, they must have high spin values, further constraining their masses.