The Observable X-Ray Signatures of Precessing Accretion Disks Predicted by the Post-Process Raytracing of General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamical Simulations

While Quasi-Periodic Oscillations (QPOs) of the X-Ray flux from black holes in X-ray binaries have been studied for decades, their origin is still not firmly established. The QPOs may be caused by the precession of the inner portions of the accretion flow. Liska et al. have developed the H-AMR General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) code, a GPU accelerated simulation utilizing adaptive mesh refinement to ensure the highest possible fidelity in regions of the disk with the highest dynamical variation. The H-AMR results show significant precession in the inner disk for an initially misaligned accretion disk (H=0.02, inclination = 65 degrees) equilibrating over time (Liska et al. 2019). In this presentation we show the results from the post-processing of this data set using the general relativistic raytracing code xTrack, which tracks photons emitted by and reflected off the evolving disk structure. We utilize the full run-time of the simulation, tracking the evolution of the disk from the initially misaligned configuration through multiple tearing events and evolving Bardeen-Petterson configuration. Our results show QPO signatures varying with both inclination and azimuth, the frequencies of which we show are a direct result of the physical dynamism of the disk’s evolution.