| Description |
Inner part of a thin accretion disk around a Kerr black hole can serve as an important tool to study
the physics of the strong gravity regime. A tilt in such a disk with respect to the black hole spin
axis is particularly useful for this purpose, as such a tilt can have a significant effect on the observed X-ray spectral and timing features via Lense-Thirring precession. The inner disk was predicted to become aligned with the spin direction of the black hole by the well known Bardeen-Petterson effect. In this study, we have analytically and numerically found that the radial extent of the inner disk alignment is much smaller than what previously estimated. Moreover, for certain reasonable values of the parameters, inner disk may not be aligned at all. This makes the inner accretion disk particularly promising to probe the black hole parameters and the accretion process in strong gravity region.
|