Circumbinary Disk Spectra Irradiated by Two Central Accretion Disks in a Binary Black Hole System

Abstract

We study the effect of irradiation from two accretion disks (minidisks) around respective black holes of stellar-to-intermediate masses in a circular binary on the spectrum of a circumbinary disk (CBD) surrounding them. We assume the CBD to be a standard disk and adopt the orbit-averaged irradiation flux because the viscous timescale is much longer than the orbital period. We then solve the energy equation both analytically and numerically to compute the CBD temperature distribution and the corresponding disk spectrum. We find that the analytically calculated spectra are in good agreement with the numerical ones. The CBD spectrum is almost independent of the binary mass ratio. We also find that the combined spectra of two minidisks and the CBD have double peaks, one peak in the soft X-ray band and the other in the infrared (IR) band. The former peak comes from the two minidisks, while the latter peak from the CBD. The observed flux density increases with frequency as ν ^1/3 toward the soft X-ray peak, while it decreases with frequency away from the IR peak as ν ^−5/3 . The latter feature is testable with near-IR observations with Subaru and JWST.

Keywords

• Black holes
• High energy astrophysics
• Compact objects
• Astrophysical black holes
• Galaxy accretion disks
• Stellar accretion disks