Related papers: Can the soft excess in AGN originate from disc ref…
Radiation pressure-dominated accretion disks are predicted to exhibit strong density inhomogeneities on scales much smaller than the disk scale height, due to the nonlinear development of photon bubble instability. Radiation would escape…
Although soft X-ray absorption features in AGN were discovered almost ten years ago, the nature and location of the gas creating them has remained controversial. However, by making use of the newly-available high-resolution spectra provided…
We present full disk X-ray reflection spectra for two currently popular accretion flow geometries for AGN -- the lamppost model frequently used to discuss the iron line reverberation in AGN, and the model where the X-rays are produced in…
It is commonly believed that accretion discs are truncated and their inner regions are described by advection dominated accretion flows (ADAFs) in the hard spectral state of black hole X-ray binaries. However, the increasing occurrence of a…
Over the last few years X-ray observations of broad-line radio galaxies (BLRGs) by ASCA, RXTE and BeppoSAX have shown that these objects seem to exhibit weaker X-ray reflection features (such as the iron K\alpha line) than radio-quiet…
X-ray observations suggest high compactness of coronae in active galactic nuclei as well as in X-ray binaries. The compactness of the source implies a strong radial dependence in the illumination of the accretion disc. This will, for any…
The spectral energy distributions of galactic black holes in the low/hard state and of low-luminosity AGN possess many common features, the most prominent being: compact, flat (or inverted) spectrum radio cores with high brightness…
We collate active galactic nuclei (AGN) with reported detections of both relativistic reflection and ultra-fast outflows. By comparing the inclination of the inner disc from reflection with the line-of-sight velocity of the outflow, we show…
Bulk velocities exceed thermal velocities for sufficiently radiation pressure dominated accretion flows. We model the contribution of bulk Comptonization to the soft X-ray excess in AGN. Bulk Comptonization is due to both turbulence and the…
Probing the physics of the accretion flow around active galactic nuclei (AGN) is crucial to understanding their emission mechanisms as well as being able to constrain the geometrical and variability properties of the different regions…
Changing-state active galactic nuclei (CSAGNs) exhibit rapid variability, with mass accretion rates that can change by several orders of magnitude in a few years. This provides us with a unique opportunity to study the evolution of the…
Quasar microlensing effects make it possible to measure the accretion disc sizes around distant supermassive black holes that are still well beyond the spatial resolution of contemporary instrumentation. The sizes measured with this…
We present a series of monitoring observations of the ultrasoft broad-line AGN RE J2248-511 with XMM-Newton. Previous X-ray observations showed a transition from a very soft state to a harder state five years later. We find that the…
Using the black hole transient X-ray source A0620-00 as an example we study the physical interplay of three theoretical constituents for modelling these transient sources: (1) the advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF) onto the central…
The observations and theory of the exciting new class of galactic black hole X-ray transients is reviewed. Seven of these systems have measured mass functions or mass estimates in excess of stable neutron stars, making them excellent black…
In this paper we examine the percentage of type 1 AGN which require the inclusion of a soft excess component and/or significant cold absorption in the modelling of their X-ray spectra obtained by XMM-Newton. We do this by simulating spectra…
We propose a novel theoretical model to describe a physical identity of the soft X-ray excess, ubiquitously detected in many Seyfert galaxies, by considering a steady-state, axisymmetric plasma accretion within the innermost stable circular…
We consider the properties of soft X-ray emission lines in the reprocessed emission from a photoionized accretion disc. Observations of these lines will be important in determining the ionization state and metallicity of the innermost…
Straight-forward models of X-ray reflection in the inner region of accretion discs predict that primary X-ray flux and the flux reflected off the surface of the disc should vary together, albeit a short light travel time delay. Most of the…
An accretion disk in an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) harbors and shields dust from external illumination: at the mid-plane of the disk around a $M_{{\rm BH}}=10^{7}M_{\odot}$ black hole, dust can exist at $0.1$pc from the black hole,…