Low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations spectra and Lense–Thirring precession

By A. Ingram, C. Done, P. Chris Fragile. 2009

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that the low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) seen in the power-density spectra of black hole binaries (and neutron stars) can be explained by the Lense–Thirring precession. This has been proposed many times in the past, and simple, single-radius models can qualitatively match the observed increase in QPO frequency by decreasing a characteristic radius, as predicted by the truncated disc models. However, this also predicts that the frequency is strongly dependent on spin, and gives a maximum frequency at the last stable orbit which is generally much higher than the remarkably constant maximum frequency at ∼10 Hz observed in all black hole binaries. The key aspect of our model, which makes it match these observations, is the precession of a radially extended region of the hot inner flow. The outer radius is set by the truncation radius of the disc as above, but the inner radius lies well outside of the last stable orbit at the point where numerical simulations show that the density drops off sharply for a misaligned flow. Physically motivated analytic estimates for this inner radius show that it increases with a*, decreasing the expected frequency in a way which almost completely cancels the expected increase with spin, and ties the maximum predicted frequency to around 10 Hz for all a*. This is the first QPO model which explains both frequencies and spectrum in the context of a well-established geometry for the accretion flow.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24db6f67ef3f4e26c160879667346a2b552cd1ca

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Citations in the corpus

The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “Interestingly, it has been suggested that amisaligned inner disk could, at high accretion rates, rotate like a solid body and thereby produce the few-Hz quasi-periodic brightness oscillations seen in several accreting stellar-mass black holes [228,83,229,230].”
Low-frequency oscillations in black holes: a spectral-timing approach to the case of GX 339-4 (2011, methodology): “The geometry described in Esin et al. (1997) and Done et al. (2007) allow to explain the spectral evolution seen in BHBs and forms the basis for the LFQPO model proposed by Ingram et al. (2009), Ingram & Done (2010) and Ingram & Done (2011), which invokes Lense-Thirring precession.”
Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “Note that jets in BHBs in the hard state do not appear to be relativistic (Fender 2006) and may well be disk jets rather than BZ jets.”
Formation of precessing jets by tilted black hole discs in 3D general relativistic MHD simulations (2017, background): “Type-C QPOs observed from BH XRBs have been interpreted as LT precession of the inner accretion flow (Stella & Vietri 1998; Ingram et al. 2009, 2016).”
Three-dimensional simulations of supercritical black hole accretion discs - luminosities, photon trapping and variability (2015, background): “Features in the power-spectrum, e.g., quasi-periodic oscillations or breaks, can manifest more subtle properties of the disks (e.g. Ingram et al. 2009; Wellons et al. 2014).”
Rapid optical and X-ray timing observations of GX 339-4: multi-component optical variability in the low/hard state (2010, background): “Epicyclic frequencies corresponding to Lense-Thirring precession (Ingram et al. 2009) could work.”
A quasi-periodic modulation of the iron line centroid energy in the black hole binary H1743−322 (2016, background): “…precession of the entire inner flow, the precession period depends on the inner and outer radii of the inner flow, the radial surface density profile of the inner flow (Fragile et al. 2007; Ingram et al. 2009), as well as the mass and dimensionless spin parameter, a = cJ/GM2, of the black hole.”