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 (a∗∼0.99), a disk inclination of i∼53∘, a mass accretion rate of M˙BH∼15%M˙Edd, and an electron density of ne∼1021cm−3 to reproduce the observed reflection features. The model also yields a source distance of D∼8.2kpc, slightly below the commonly adopted value of 10kpc 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.
@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}
}