Analysis demonstrates that magnetically driven winds create complex X-ray absorption features in black hole systems, indicating a rich ionization structure.
We investigate accretion disk winds commonly observed in Galactic black hole (BH) X-ray binaries (XRBs), which manifest as blueshifted absorption features in X-ray spectra. We model these winds as ideal magnetohydrodynamic outflows of hot plasma driven by global magnetic fields threading the accretion disk around the BH. Using Monte Carlo simulations with Monte Carlo Simulations for Astrophysics and Cosmology, we solve three-dimensional radiative transfer equations to determine the large-scale ionization structure that produces the observed ionic column densities. Focusing on the high/soft state of the BH XRB, where disk emission provides the dominant source of ionizing X-rays, we calculated synthetic spectra showing resonance absorption and scattered emission from ions in various charge states. Our results demonstrate that systems viewed at high polar angles exhibit prominent multi-ion absorption lines with asymmetric profiles, accompanied by P-Cygni-like emission features that partially reproduce the characteristics seen in the observed spectra. This further implies that even a dense disk wind with a high polar angle is unlikely to be saturated due to effective scattering.
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Keigo Fukumura (2025) studied this question.
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