A systematic look at the Very High and Low/Hard state of GX 339-4: Constraining the black hole spin with a new reflection model

By R. Reis, A. C. Fabian, R. Ross, G. Miniutti, Jon M. Miller, C. Reynolds. 2008

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We present a systematic study of GX 339−4 in both its very high and low hard states from simultaneous observations made with XMM‐Newton and RXTE in 2002 and 2004. The X-ray spectra of both these extreme states exhibit strong reflection signatures, with a broad, skewed Fe Kα line clearly visible above the continuum. Using a newly developed, self-consistent reflection model which implicitly includes the blackbody radiation of the disc as well as the effect of Comptonization, blurred with a relativistic line function, we were able to infer the spin parameter of GX 339−4 to be 0.935 ± 0.01 (statistical) ±0.01 (systematic) at 90 per cent confidence. We find that both states are consistent with an ionized thin accretion disc extending to the innermost stable circular orbit around the rapidly spinning black hole.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a868656a36224b0b898a98801ddf8aac1bb2f1b

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Citations in the corpus

Accretion disc variability in the hard state of black hole X-ray binaries (2009, background): “However, this radius may be even smaller for smaller H/R, which would make the disc truncation radius consistent with the results from fits to the iron line (this work, and Reis et al. 2008, 2009).”
STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLE SPIN CONSTRAINTS FROM DISK REFLECTION AND CONTINUUM MODELING (2009, methodology): “A spin ofa > 0.98 has been reported for the Seyfert-1 AGN MCG-6-30-15 (Brenneman & Reynolds 2007), and a spin ofa = 0.93(5) has been reported in GX 339-4 (Miller et al. 2008; see also Reis et al. 2008).”
THE CONSTANT INNER-DISK RADIUS OF LMC X-3: A BASIS FOR MEASURING BLACK HOLE SPIN (2010, methodology): “In recent years, both methods have been used to estimate the spins of stellar BHs (e.g., Shafee et al. 2006; McClintock et al. 2006; Davis et al. 2006; Reis et al. 2008; Miller et al. 2009; Blum et al. 2009).”
Black hole accretion discs in the canonical low‐hard state (2009, methodology): “In this work, the low-hard state spectrum of GX 339−4 described in Miller et al. (2004) is reanalysed using the more stringent reduction procedure detailed in Reis et al. (2008).”
Rapid optical and X-ray timing observations of GX 339-4: multi-component optical variability in the low/hard state (2010, background): “…Corbel & Fender 2002; Homan et al. 2005), while the X-rays are thought to originate as a result of Compton upscattering of seed photons either from the disc or from the jet (Reis et al. 2008; Markoff et al. 2005), or as a direct result of optically-thinjet synchrotron (e.g. Maitra et al. 2009).”
The role of the reflection fraction in constraining black hole spin (2014, background): “…et al. 2012), or NGC 1365, (Risaliti et al. 2013), Galactic Black Holes, such as Cyg X-1 (Fabian et al. 1989; Duro et al. 2011; Tomsick et al. 2014), GRS 1915+10 (Miller et al. 2013b), or GX 339−4 (Miller et al. 2008; Reis et al. 2008), and neutron stars (e.g., Serpens X-1; Miller et al. 2013a).”
IMPROVED REFLECTION MODELS OF BLACK HOLE ACCRETION DISKS: TREATING THE ANGULAR DISTRIBUTION OF X-RAYS (2013, background): “…Dauser et al. 2012; Fabian et al. 2012b; Gallo et al. 2011; Ponti et al. 2010; Brenneman et al. 2011, 2013; Duro et al. 2011; Miller et al. 2006; Reis et al. 2008) have revealed a steeper emissivity at the inner parts of the accretion disk than the canonically assumed r−3 dependence (Shakura &…”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “Related errors appear to be small, at the level of a few percent or less ([279]).”
Measuring the spins of accreting black holes (2011, background): “Other important papers on the spins of stellar-mass black holes include Reis et al (2009, 2008).”
Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “Miller et al. 2006 (see also Reis et al. 2008) had previously claimed that the data indicated an extremely broad iron line.”
THE SPIN OF THE SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE IN NGC 3783 (2011, background): “These spectral features have been observed and well characterized in both AGNs (Tanaka et al. 1995; Fabian et al. 1995) and stellar-mass black hole systems (Miller et al. 2002; Reis et al. 2008).”