Fast infrared variability from a relativistic jet in GX 339-4

By P. Casella, T. Maccarone, K. O'Brien, R. Fender, D. M. Russell, M. van der Klis, A. Pe’er, D. Maitra, D. Altamirano, T. Belloni and 7 more. 2010

105 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the discovery of fast infrared/X-ray correlated variability in the black hole transient GX 339-4. The source was observed with subsecond time resolution simultaneously with Very Large Telescope/Infrared Spectrometer And Array Camera and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer/Proportional Counter Array in 2008 August, during its persistent low-flux highly variable hard state. The data show a strong correlated variability, with the infrared emission lagging the X-ray emission by 100 ms. The short time delay and the nearly symmetric cross-correlation function, together with the measured brightness temperature of similar to 2.5 x 10(6) K, indicate that the bright and highly variable infrared emission most likely comes from a jet near the black hole. Under standard assumptions about jet physics, the measured time delay can provide us a lower limit of Gamma > 2 for the Lorentz factor of the jet. This suggests that jets from stellar-mass black holes are at least mildly relativistic near their launching region. We discuss implications for future applications of this technique.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a3f9dfb6d63d69df349ecee0f0ed47e02f15115

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Thomas R. Marsh
2. Poshak Gandhi
3. G. Dubus
4. J. Miller
5. H. Spruit
6. Tariq Shahbaz
7. P. Casella
8. Aya Kubota

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Poshak Gandhi
2. G. Dubus
3. J. Miller
4. H. Spruit
5. P. Casella
6. Aya Kubota
7. D. Giannios
8. T. Belloni

Citations in the corpus

• Gamma-ray binaries and related systems (2013, background): “A significant fraction of the accretion energy released in X-ray binaries is channeled to launch relativistic jets, whose non-thermal emission is observed in radio (Fender 2006), infrared (Casella et al. 2010; Russell et al. 2010), and X-rays (Corbel et al. 2002, 2005).”
• Rapid optical and X-ray timing observations of GX 339-4: multi-component optical variability in the low/hard state (2010, background): “…additional underlying single broad-band component will require extending such an rms analysis to low energies in the near-IR (cf. Hynes et al. 2003a; Casella et al. 2010), because this regime is not expected to have strong contributions from the disc or inner hot flow and jet base discussed above.”