X-Ray Emission from Accretion Disks in Low-Mass X-Ray Binaries

General relativity is used to model the X-ray emission from geometrically thin disks in low-mass X-ray binaries. For a neutron star with a mass of 1.4 solar masses and an accretion rate of 10 to the 18th g/s, the maximum color temperature is found to be lower in the general relativistic model (about 1.1 keV) than in the Newtonian model (3.3 keV). It is suggested that differences between the two models are due to the gravitational redshift, the relativistic Doppler shift, the change in the inner boundary condition, and the change in the motion in the gas disk.