Simultaneous Chandra and RXTE Spectroscopy of the Microquasar H1743–322: Clues to Disk Wind and Jet Formation from a Variable Ionized Outflow

By J. Miller, J. C. Raymond, J. Homan, A. C. Fabian, D. Steeghs, R. Wijnands, M. Rupen, P. Charles, M. van der Klis, W. B. H. CfA and 5 more. 2004

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We observed the bright phase of the 2003 outburst of the Galactic black hole candidate H1743-322 in X-rays simultaneously with Chandra and RXTE on four occasions. The Chandra HETGS spectra reveal narrow, variable (He-like) Fe XXV and (H-like) Fe XXVI resonance absorption lines. In the first observation, the Fe XXVI line has a FWHM of 1800 ± 400 km s-1 and a blueshift of 700 ± 200 km s-1, suggesting that the highly ionized medium is an outflow. Moreover, the Fe XXV line is observed to vary significantly on a timescale of a few hundred seconds in the first observation, which corresponds to the Keplerian orbital period at approximately 104rg (where rg = GM/c2). Our models for the absorption geometry suggest that a combination of changing ionizing flux and geometric effects are required to account for the large changes in line flux observed between observations and that the absorption likely occurs at a radius between 102rg and 104rg for a 10 M☉ black hole. We suggest that the absorption occurs in an inhomogeneous accretion disk wind. If the wind in H1743-322 has unity filling factor, the highest implied mass outflow rate is 5% of the Eddington mass accretion rate. The observed wind may be a hotter, more ionized version of the Seyfert-like, outflowing warm absorber geometries recently found in the Galactic black holes GX 339-4 and XTE J1650-500. We discuss these findings in the context of ionized Fe absorption lines found in the spectra of other Galactic sources, and connections to warm absorbers, winds and jets in other accreting systems.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4dbe708b410a255024ecc2f0daeb80693a9b66b2

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Citations in the corpus

Ubiquitous equatorial accretion disc winds in black hole soft states (2012, background): “5 shows that the mass outflow 4 For example, under various assumptions about the gas density, different authors studying the same data set found ionization parameters that vary by ∼2 orders of magnitude (Miller et al. 2006a, 2008; Netzer 2006; Kallman et al. 2009).”
GLOBAL STRUCTURE OF THREE DISTINCT ACCRETION FLOWS AND OUTFLOWS AROUND BLACK HOLES FROM TWO-DIMENSIONAL RADIATION-MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC SIMULATIONS (2011, background): “…the past decade: subcritical accretion onto intermediate-mass black holes with the black hole mass greatly exceeding 100M⊙ (e.g., Makishima et al. 2000; Miller et al. 2004) and supercritical accretion onto stellar-mass black holes with mass of 3 − 20M⊙ (e.g., King et al. 2001; Watarai et al. 2001).”
The Accretion Disk Wind in the Black Hole GRO J1655–40 (2008, methodology): “In H 1743−322, a highly ionized wind has also been observed; photoionization modeling suggests an inner launching radius ofr0 = 1×108 cm (Miller et al. 2006).”
Relativistic X-Ray Lines from the Inner Accretion Disks Around Black Holes (2007, methodology): “The outflows implied in stellar mass black holes such as GX 339−4 are generally a small fraction of the Eddington mass accretion rate (Miller et al. 2004b, 2006b), and those seen in all black hole spectra fall well-below the velocity required (v/c ≥ 0.3) for such effects to be important.”
WATCHDOG: A COMPREHENSIVE ALL-SKY DATABASE OF GALACTIC BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES (2015, background): “An additional outflow, in the form of an accretion disk wind, has also been detected in this source (Miller et al. 2004; Ponti et al. 2012).”