Energy-dependent variability from accretion flows

Abstract

We develop a formalism to calculate energy-dependent fractional variability (rms) in accretion flows. We consider rms spectra resulting from radial dependencies of the level of local variability (as expected from propagation of disturbances in accretion flows) assuming the constant shape of the spectrum emitted at a given radius. We consider the cases when the variability of the flow is either coherent or incoherent between different radial zones. As example local emission, we consider blackbody, Wien and thermal Comptonization spectra. In addition to numerical results, we present a number of analytical formulae for the resulting rms. We also find an analytical formula for the disc Wien spectrum, which we find to be a very good approximation to the disc blackbody. We compare our results to the rms spectrum observed in an ultrasoft state of GRS 1915+105.