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Line shifts in accretion disks—the case of Fe K\(\alpha\)

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Abstract

Here we present a short overview and main results of our investigations of several effects which can induce shifts in the broad Fe K\(\alpha\) line emitted from relativistic accretion disks around single and binary supermassive black holes. We used numerical simulations based on ray-tracing method in the Kerr metric to study the role of classical Doppler shift, special relativistic transverse Doppler shift and Doppler beaming, general relativistic gravitational redshift, and perturbations of the disk emissivity in the formation of the observed Fe K\(\alpha\) line profiles. Besides, we also investigated whether the observed line profiles from the binary systems of supermassive black holes could be affected by the Doppler shifts due to dynamics of such systems. The presented results demonstrate that all these effects could have a significant influence on the observed profiles of the broad Fe K\(\alpha\) line emitted from relativistic accretion disks around single and binary supermassive black holes.

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Acknowledgements

This research is part of the projects 176003 “Gravitation and the large scale structure of the Universe” and 176001 “Astrophysical Spectroscopy of Extragalactic Objects”, supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. This research is also partially supported by the SEENET-MTP—ICTP Program PRJ-09 “Strings and Cosmology”.

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Correspondence to P. Jovanović.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Line Shifts in Astrophysics and Laboratory Plasma. Guest Editors: Jack Sulentic, Luka C. Popovic.

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Jovanović, P., Borka Jovanović, V., Borka, D. et al. Line shifts in accretion disks—the case of Fe K\(\alpha\) . Astrophys Space Sci 361, 75 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-016-2653-z

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