2007ApJ...664...14F

We describe the methodology and compute the illumination of geometrically thin accretion disks around black holes of arbitrary spin parameter a exposed to the radiation of a pointlike isotropic source at arbitrary height above the disk on its symmetry axis. We then provide analytic fitting formulae for the illumination as a function of the source height h and the black hole angular momentum a. We find that for a source on the disk symmetry axis and with h/M>3, the main effect of the parameter a is allowing the disk to extend to smaller radii (approaching r/M⟶1 as a/M⟶1) and thus allowing the illumination of regions of much higher rotational velocity and redshift. We also compute the illumination profiles for anisotropic emission associated with the motion of the source relative to the accretion disk and present the fractions of photons absorbed by the black hole, intercepted by the disk, or escaping to infinity for both isotropic and anisotropic emission for a/M=0 and 0.99. As the anisotropy (of a source approaching the disk) increases, the illumination profile reduces (approximately) to a single power law, whose index q, because of absorption of the beamed photons by the black hole, saturates to a value no higher than q≳3. Finally, we compute the fluorescent Fe line profiles associated with the specific illumination and compare them among various cases.