English

Modeling X-ray reflection spectra from returning radiation: application to 4U 1630$-$47

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-01-22 v1

Abstract

Returning radiation is thought to play a key role in disk illumination of black hole X-ray binaries in the high-soft state, yet it has not been fully incorporated into XSPEC reflection models. We present a new table model for reflection spectroscopy that, for the first time, self-consistently accounts for the returning radiation. To isolate this effect, we adopt the standard disk-corona configuration but disable the corona, allowing the reflection spectrum to be produced solely by self-irradiation of the disk. Applying our model to the black hole X-ray binary 4U 1630-47, we report a rapidly spinning black hole (a0.99a_* \sim 0.99), a disk inclination of i53i \sim 53^\circ, a mass accretion rate of M˙BH15%M˙Edd\dot{M}_{\rm BH} \sim 15\% \, {\rm \dot{M}_{Edd}}, and an electron density of ne1021cm3n_{\rm e} \sim 10^{21} \,\mathrm{cm^{-3}} to reproduce the observed reflection features. The model also yields a source distance of D8.2kpcD\sim 8.2 \, {\rm kpc}, slightly below the commonly adopted value of 10kpc10 \, {\rm kpc} in the literature. Compared to the widely used relxillNS, our model naturally produces a harder high-energy reflection spectrum, fitting the data without invoking a Comptonized component.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.14860,
  title  = {Modeling X-ray reflection spectra from returning radiation: application to 4U 1630$-$47},
  author = {Kostas Kourmpetis and Shafqat Riaz and Honghui Liu and Temurbek Mirzaev and Cosimo Bambi and Debtroy Das and Jiachen Jiang and Kostas D. Kokkotas and Andrea Santangelo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14860},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:13:51.336Z