X-ray observations of accretion disks

Abstract

Abstract Present understandings of accretion disks based on X-ray observations are reviewed. The main focus is on observational properties of accretion disks around black holes in X-ray binaries and their phenomenological interpretations. Since there are several excellent reviews on black hole binaries already, we here pick up a limited number of important works which introduced key observational clues which widen and/or deepen the understanding of the accretion disks, recalling histories of X-ray observations of binary X-ray sources with a number of X-ray astronomy satellites successively launched from the United States, European countries, and Japan. We at certain points compare some observational evidence from black hole binaries with similar phenomena observed from binaries with a weakly magnetized neutron star, to clarify the basic nature of accretion disks. We also try to understand accretion environments in active galactic nuclei by applying what we have learned from the black hole binaries to them.