Population X: Are the super-Eddington X-ray sources beamed jets in microblazars or intermediate mass black holes?

By E. Koerding, Heino Falcke, S. Markoff. 2001

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Recent x-ray observations reveal an increasing number of x-ray sources in nearby galaxies exceeding luminosities of Lx >~ 2 x 10^39 erg s-1. Assuming isotropic emission, the Eddington limit suggests a population of intermediate-mass black holes of M >> 10 Msun. However, Markoff et al. proposed that jets may be contributing to the x-ray emission from x-ray binaries (XRBs), implying that some x-ray sources may be relativistically beamed. This could reduce the required black hole masses to standard values. To test this hypothesis, we investigate a simple x-ray population synthesis model for x-ray point sources in galaxies with relativistic beaming and compare it with an isotropic emission model. The model is used to explain a combined data set of x-ray point sources in nearby galaxies. We show that the current distributions are consistent with black hole masses M < ~10 Msun and bulk Lorentz factors for jets in microquasars of gammaj ~ 5. Alternatively, intermediate mass black holes up to 1000 Msun are required which are distributed in a powerlaw with roughly (dN)/(dM) ~ M^-2.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/111cd9560741257eae7ca66ab9ee2bc8086599da

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Citations in the corpus

High-resolution imaging of the He II λ4686 emission line nebula associated with the ultraluminous X-ray source in Holmberg II (2004, background): “…of the observed X-ray flux in Galactic binaries previously thought to be dominated by disk and coronal emission (Markoff, Falcke, & Fender 2001), Körding et al. (2002) have suggested that the ULXs may be stellar-mass black holes in which relativistic beaming in jets aligned nearly along our…”
Ultraluminous X-ray sources in the Chandra and XMM-Newton era (2011, background): “Naturally, a possible explanation for the early sample ofROSATULXs was that they were microblazars, or SS 433-like objects seen face-on (Fabrika & Mescheryakov 2001; Körding et al. 2002; Begelman et al. 2006).”
X-ray Source Populations in Galaxies (2003, methodology): “…area in thick accretion disks, resulting from the large thermal-timescale mass transfer characterizing the later stages of a massive XRB. Exploiting the similarity with Galactic microquasars, the jet emission model of Körding et al. (2002) produces enhanced luminosity via relativistic beaming.”