Narrow‐line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) galaxies have low‐mass black holes and mass accretion rates close to (or exceeding) Eddington, so a standard blackbody accretion disc should peak in the extreme ultraviolet. However, the lack of true absorption opacity in the disc means that the emission is better approximated by a colour temperature corrected blackbody, and this colour temperature correction is large enough (∼2.4) that the bare disc emission from a zero spin black hole can extend into the soft X‐ray bandpass. Part of the soft X‐ray excess seen in these objects must be intrinsic emission from the disc unless the vertical structure is very different to that predicted. None the less, this is not the whole story even for the extreme NLS1 as the shape of the soft excess is much broader than predicted by a bare disc spectrum, indicating some Compton upscattering by warm, optically thick material. We associate this with the disc itself, so it must ultimately be powered by mass accretion. We build an energetically self‐consistent model assuming that the emission thermalizes to a (colour temperature corrected) blackbody only at large radii. At smaller radii the gravitational energy is split between powering optically thick Comptonized disc emission (forming the soft X‐ray excess) and an optically thin corona above the disc (forming the tail to higher energies). We show examples of this model fit to the extreme NLS1 RE J1034+396, and to the much lower Eddington fraction broad‐line Seyfert 1 PG 1048+231. We use these to guide our fits and interpretations of three template spectra made from co‐adding multiple sources to track out a sequence of active galactic nucleus (AGN) spectra as a function of L/LEdd. Both the individual objects and template spectra show the surprising result that the Compton upscattered soft X‐ray excess decreases in importance with increasing L/LEdd. The strongest soft excesses are associated with low mass accretion rate AGN rather than being tied to some change in disc structure around Eddington. We argue that this suggests a true break in accretion flow properties between stellar and supermassive black holes. The new model is publicly available within the xspec spectral fitting package.

This paper presents a continuation of our efforts to numerically study accretion disks that are misaligned (tilted) with respect to the rotation axis of a Kerr black hole. Here we present results of a global numerical simulation which fully incorporates the effects of the black hole spacetime as well as magnetorotational turbulence that is the primary source of angular momentum transport in the flow. This simulation shows dramatic differences from comparable simulations of untilted disks. Accretion onto the hole occurs predominantly through two opposing plunging streams that start from high latitudes with respect to both the black-hole and disk midplanes. This is due to the aspherical nature of the gravitational spacetime around the rotating black hole. These plunging streams start from a larger radius than would be expected for an untilted disk. In this regard the tilted black hole effectively acts like an untilted black hole of lesser spin. Throughout the duration of the simulation, the main body of the disk remains tilted with respect to the symmetry plane of the black hole; thus there is no indication of a Bardeen-Petterson effect in the disk at large. The torque of the black hole instead principally causes a global precession of the main disk body. In this simulation the precession has a frequency of 3(M ⊙ /M ) Hz, a value consistent with many observed low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations. However, this value is strongly dependent on the size of the disk, so this frequency may be expected to vary over a large range.

We consider the dynamical evolution of bound, hierarchical triples of supermassive black holes that might be formed in the nuclei of galaxies undergoing sequential mergers. The tidal force of the outer black hole on the inner binary produces eccentricity oscillations through the Kozai mechanism, and this can substantially reduce the gravitational wave merger time of the inner binary. We numerically calculate the merger time for a wide range of initial conditions and black hole mass ratios, including the effects of octupole interactions in the triple as well as general relativistic periastron precession in the inner binary. The semimajor axes and the mutual inclination of the inner and outer binaries are the most important factors affecting the merger time. We find that for a random distribution of inclination angles and approximately equal mass black holes, it is possible to reduce the merger time of a near circular inner binary by more than a factor of ten in over fifty percent of all cases. We estimate that a typical exterior quadrupole moment from surrounding matter in the galaxy may also be sufficient to excite eccentricity oscillations in supermassive black hole binaries, and also accelerate black hole mergers.Comment: 25 pages, including 12 figures; uses AASTeX v5.0; revised version accepted for publication in Ap

We present calculations of non-LTE, relativistic accretion disk models applicable to the high/soft state of black hole X-ray binaries. We include the effects of thermal Comptonization and bound-free and free-free opacities of all abundant ion species. Taking into account the relativistic propagation of photons from the local disk surface to an observer at infinity, we present spectra calculated for a variety of accretion rates, black hole spin parameters, disk inclinations, and stress prescriptions. We also consider nonzero inner torques on the disk and explore different vertical dissipation profiles, including some that are motivated by recent radiation magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of magnetorotational turbulence. Bound-free metal opacity generally produces significantly less spectral hardening than previous models that only considered Compton scattering and free-free opacity. We find that the resulting effective photosphere usually lies at a small fraction of the total column depth, producing spectra that are remarkably independent of the stress prescription and vertical structure assumptions. We provide detailed comparisons between our models and the widely used multicolor disk model. Frequency-dependent discrepancies exist that may affect the parameters of other spectral components when this simpler disk model is used to fit modern X-ray data. For a given source, our models predict that the luminosity in the high /soft state should approximately scale with the fourth power of the empirically inferred maximum temperature, but with a slight hardening at high luminosities. This is in good agreement with observations.

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When the accretion rate is more than a small fraction of Eddington, the inner regions of accretion disks around black holes are expected to be radiation-dominated. However, in the α-model, these regions are also expected to be thermally unstable. In this paper, we report two 3-d radiation MHD simulations of a vertically-stratified shearing box in which the ratio of radiation to gas pressure is ∼ 10, and yet no thermal runaway occurs over a timespan ≃ 40 cooling times. Where the time-averaged dissipation rate is greater than the critical dissipation rate that creates hydrostatic equilibrium by diffusive radiation flux, the time-averaged radiation flux is held to the critical value, with the excess dissipated energy transported by radiative advection. Although the stress and total pressure are well-correlated as predicted by the α-model, we show that stress fluctuations precede pressure fluctuations, contrary to the usual supposition that the pressure controls the saturation level of the magnetic energy. This fact explains the thermal stability. Using a simple toy-model, we show that independently-generated magnetic fluctuations can drive radiation pressure fluctuations, creating a correlation between the two while maintaining thermal stability.

A fundamental component of models of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. However, the nature of this accretion disk is not well understood, and current models do not provide a satisfactory explanation of the optical/UV continuum observed in AGNs. In this paper we review the substantial theoretical and observational progress made in the field. We also try to point out future research directions that would be fruitful in trying to obtain a complete, self-consistent model of the continuum-emitting regions.

We present two new formulations of magnetohydrodynamics ͑MHD͒, in the limit where the inertia of the charge carriers can be neglected. The first employs Lagrangian coordinates and generalizes Newcomb's formalism to allow for a variable time slicing. It contains an extremely simple prescription for generalizing the action of a relativistic Nambu-Goto string to four dimensions. It is also related by a duality transformation to the action presented by Achterberg. This transformation causes the perturbed and unperturbed Lagrangian coordinates to exchange roles as dynamical fields and background spacetime. Our second formulation introduces massless electrically charged fermions as the current carrying modes, and considers long wavelength perturbations with 2 ,k Ќ 2 ӶeB. Because the Fermi zero mode can be bosonized separately on each magnetic flux line, the current density may be written in terms of a four-dimensional axion field that acts as a Lagrange multiplier to enforce the MHD condition. The fundamental modes of the magnetofluid in this limit comprise two oppositely directed Alfvén modes and the fast mode, all of which propagate at the speed of light. We calculate the nonlinear interaction between two Alfvén modes, and show that in both formulations it satisfies the same simple expression. This provides the first exact treatment of the effects of compressibility on nonlinear interactions between MHD waves. We then summarize the interactions between Alfvén modes, between Alfvén modes and fast modes, and between fast modes in terms of a simplified Lagrangian. The three-mode interaction between fast modes is a magnetohydrodynamic analogue of the QED process of photon splitting, but occurs in background magnetic fields of arbitrary strength. The scaling behavior of an Alfvén wave cascade in a box is derived, paying close attention to boundary conditions. This result also applies to nonrelativistic MHD media and differs from those obtained by previous authors in the nonrelativistic regime. Finally, we briefly outline the physical processes which determine the inner scale of such a cascade in neutron star magnetospheres, black hole accretion disks, and ␥-ray burst sources. At low charge density, the waves at the inner scale may become charge starved; whereas Compton drag is the dominant dissipative mechanism at large optical depth to electron scattering. A turbulent cascade leads to effective dissipation even in optically thick media, and in particular can significantly raise the entropy-baryon ratio in the relativistic outflows that power cosmological ␥-ray bursts. ͓S0556-2821͑98͒03806-5͔