A black hole spectral signature

An accreting black hole is, by definition, characterized by the drain. Namely, the matter falls into a black hole much the same way as water disappears down a drain — matter goes in and nothing comes out. As this can only happen in a black hole, it provides a way to see “a black hole”, an unique observational signature. The accretion proceeds almost in a free-fall manner close to the black hole horizon, where the strong gravitational field dominates the pressure forces. In this paper we present analytical calculations and Monte-Carlo simulations of the specific features of X-ray spectra formed as a result of upscattering of the soft (disk) photons in the converging inflow (CI) into the black hole. The full relativistic treatment has been implemented to reproduce these spectra. We show that spectra in the soft state of black hole systems (BHS) can be described as the sum of a thermal (disk) component and the convolution of some fraction of this component with the CI upscattering spread (Greens) function. The latter boosted photon component is seen as an extended power-law at energies much higher than the characteristic energy of the soft photons. We demonstrate the stability of the power spectral index over a wide range of the plasma temperature 0 – 10 keV and mass accretion rates (higher than 2 in Eddington units). We also demonstrate that the sharp high energy cutoff occurs at energies of 200–400 keV which are related to the average energy of electrons m_ec² impinging upon the event horizon. The spectrum is practically identical to the standard thermal Comptonization spectrum when the CI plasma temperature is getting of order of 50 keV (the typical ones for the hard state of BHS). In this case one can see the effect of the bulk motion only at high energies where there is an excess in the CI spectrum with respect to the pure thermal one. Furthermore we demonstrate that the change of spectral shapes from the soft X-ray state to the hard X-ray state is clearly to be related with the temperature of the bulk flow. In other words the effect of the bulk Comptonization compared to the thermal one is getting stronger when the plasma temperature drops below 10 keV. We clearly demonstrate that these spectra emerging from the converging inflow are a inevitable stamp of the BHS where the strong gravitational field dominates the pressure forces.