Paper detail

Relativistic smearing of the reflection spectrum in Galactic Black Hole Candidates

We identify the reflected component in the GINGA spectra of Nova Muscae, a Black Hole transient system which has been used as the prototype for the recent advection dominated disk models. We see that the reflected spectrum is generally significantly relativistically smeared, and use this and the amount of reflection to track the innermost extent of the accretion disk. We see that the optically thick disk does retreat during the decline, but more slowly than predicted by the advective models, posing problems for this description of the accretion flow.