Spectra of AGN Accretion Disks — Preliminary Results

Abstract

After the suggestion (Shields 1978) that some AGN emission might arise in an opaque accretion disk around a supermassive compact object, several papers (e.g., Malkan and Sargent 1982; Malkan 1983; Bechtold et al. 1987) have interpreted the flat ultraviolet continuum (“big blue bump”) observed in many AGN spectra, in terms of such a model. The early calculations approximated the radiation locally emergent from the accretion disk as blackbody; the more recent calculations (e.g., Czerny and Elvis 1987; Wandel and Petrosian 1988) have treated this emission as (electron-scattering) modified (possibly comptonized) blackbody.