Coronal heating and emission mechanisms in AGN
Abstract
Popular models for the formation of X-ray spectra in AGN assume that a large fraction of the disk's angular momentum dissipation takes place in a hot corona that carries a small amount of the accreting mass. Here I discuss the formation of a magnetically-structured accretion disk corona, generated by buoyancy instability in the disk and the heating of localized flare regions up to the canonical X-ray emitting temperatures. I also examine the analogy between accreting disk-coronae and ADAFs and discuss the relevant emission mechanism in these two accretion models and how observational constraints can allow us to discriminate between them.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9912221,
title = {Coronal heating and emission mechanisms in AGN},
author = {Tiziana Di Matteo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9912221},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
10 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the Bologna conference on "X-ray Astronomy 1999: Stellar Endpoints, AGN, and the Diffuse X-ray Background" (Astroph. Lett. and Comm.)