Observational Appearance of Relativistic, Spherically Symmetric Massive Winds

The photon mean free path in a relativistically moving medium becomes long in the downstream direction, while short in the upstream direction. As a result, the observed optical depth, � , becomes small in the downstream direction while large in the upstream direction. Hence, if a relativistic spherical wind blows off, the optical depth depends strongly on its speed and the angle between the velocity and the line-of-sight. Abramowicz, Novikov, and Paczynski (1991, ApJ, 369, 175) examined such a relativistic wind, and found that the shape of the photosphere at � = 1 appears to be convex in the nonrelativistic case, but concave for relativistic velocities. We further calculated the temperature distribution and luminosity of the photosphere both in the comoving and inertial frames. We found that the limb-darkening effect would be strongly modified in the relativistic regime. We also found that the luminosities of the photosphere become large as the wind speed increases due to relativistic effects. In addition, the luminosity in the inertial frame is higher than that in the comoving frame. These results suggest that the observed temperature and brightness in luminous objects may be overestimated when there are strong relativistic winds.