V. Conclusions

The italian-dutch satellite SAX, scanning the sky since 1996, is expected to give its most interesting contributions in the hard X-ray band. Other satellite missions that have been planned but have not yet started, like AXAF and XMM, are particularly aimed to give important results in the soft and medium X-rays. This is why a couple of years more is needed in order to see well-resolved iron line profiles, with a better signal-to-noise ratio, after the preliminary, troughout encouraging spectra got by the japanese satellite ASCA.
As already reminded, even if much more data and better resolved spectra are strongly needed in order to put strong constrains on the various models, a lot of work has already started regarding profiles of both static and spinning BHs under various physical and geometrical assumptions. In our opinion this work has to be matched together with a careful treatment of the underlying continuum component, so that self-consistent calculations of X-ray spectra, with reflected continuum and line profiles together, produced by sources around BHs, can be made. This issue is also important because the observed line profiles are usually obtained through subtraction of a continuum component for which important relativistic effects, such as the iron edge smearing, are not taken into accout.

In the present work we have essentially been able to show that in presence of an accreting BH system the iron edge as well as the lines should be smoothed down ("smearing") and the whole broad-band spectrum should spread out in frequency ("enlargement") because of the energy shift of the photons, that will be more and more pronounced towards both ends of the spectrum with increasing observer inclinations, as a result of the Doppler shift.

Only standard assumptions for the disc physics and structure have been considered here. These assumptions can be changed and more calculations can be easily performed if other accretion models are considered, such as those related with advection dominated flows [ADAF] (see e.g.: Abramowicz et al. 1996; for an updated review: Narayan et al. 1998). Even bimodal accretion flows can be treated, i.e. transitions from one to another regime of accretion in the flow itself (e.g. Dullemond & Turolla 1998), like in the work made by Done et al. (1997) who calculated both line and reflected continuum in the Schwarzschild metric giving evidence to the relativistic smearing, too, with regard to a BHC (Nova Muscae).

Such "non-standard" accretion models can be the subject of much future work. On the same way, in the future it will be important to look for independent confirmations of the estimates of BH-spin and other parameters that one can make looking at the effects on the X-band features. These confirmations can be obtained for instance through variability issues. At this regard, RXTE observations of fast, stable quasi periodic oscillations (QPOs) in BHCs have recently raised much interest, and even an AGN like IRAS 18325-5926 is an excellent case to be studied, because of both the presence of a broad, possibly relativistic iron line (Iwasawa et al. 1995, 1996a) and of a recent claim, based on ASCA observations, that the source shows a periodic variability at about 58 ks.

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