On the Steady Nature of Line‐driven Disk Winds: Application to Cataclysmic Variables

We apply the semi-analytical analysis of the steady nature of line-drivenwinds presented in two earlier papers to disk winds driven by the fluxdistribution of a standard Shakura & Sunyaev (1973) disk for typicalcataclysmic variable (CV) parameters. We find that the wind critical pointtends to be closer to the disk surface towards the inner disk regions. Our mainconclusion, however, is that a line-driven wind, arising from a steady diskflux distribution of a standard Shakura-Sunyaev disk capable of locallysupplying the corresponding mass flow, is steady. These results confirm thefindings of an earlier paper that studied "simple" flux distributions that aremore readily analyzable than those presented here. These results are consistentwith the steady velocity nature of outflows observationally inferred for bothCVs and quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). We find good agreement with the 2.5D CVdisk wind models of Pereyra and collaborators. These results suggest that thelikely scenario to account for the wind outflows commonly observed in CVs isthe line-driven accretion disk wind scenario, as suggested early-on by Cordova& Mason (1982). For QSOs, these results show that the line-driven accretiondisk wind continues to be a promising scenario to account for the outflowsdetected in broad absorption line (BAL) QSOs, as suggested early-on by Turnshek(1984), and analyzed in detail by Murray et al. (1995).Comment: 35 pages, 20 figure