THE MASS OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1

By J. Orosz, J. E. McClintock, J. Aufdenberg, Ronald A. Remillard, M. J. Reid, Ramesh Narayan, Lijun Gou. 2011

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Cygnus X-1 is a binary star system that is comprised of a black hole and a massive giant companion star in a tight orbit. Building on our accurate distance measurement reported in the preceding paper, we first determine the radius of the companion star, thereby constraining the scale of the binary system. To obtain a full dynamical model of the binary, we use an extensive collection of optical photometric and spectroscopic data taken from the literature. By using all of the available observational constraints, we show that the orbit is slightly eccentric (both the radial velocity and photometric data independently confirm this result) and that the companion star rotates roughly 1.4 times its pseudosynchronous value. We find a black hole mass of M = 14.8 ± 1.0 M☉, a companion mass of Mopt = 19.2 ± 1.9 M☉, and the angle of inclination of the orbital plane to our line of sight of i = 27.1 ± 0.8 deg.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/762d0d85a4c6ea821b20b0e4381487b5e819b7eb

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Citations in the corpus

MISSING BLACK HOLES UNVEIL THE SUPERNOVA EXPLOSION MECHANISM (2011, background): “Both models provide X-ray binaries with black holes more massive than 5 M⊙, extending to about 15 M⊙ and coinciding with the most massive black holes observed in the Galaxy: Cyg X-1 (14.8 M⊙ ± 1.0, Orosz et al. 2011) and GRS 1915 (14 M⊙ ± 4, Casares 2007).”
BlackCAT: A catalogue of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray transients (2015, background): “7 Iab donor star, Orosz et al. 2011a) is the only confirmed Galactic BH in a persistent X-ray binary.”
WATCHDOG: A COMPREHENSIVE ALL-SKY DATABASE OF GALACTIC BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES (2015, methodology): “…(1995), [48] Filippenko et al. (1997), [49] Harlaftis et al. (1997),[50]Neil et al. (2007), [51] Orosz et al. (2001), [52] Gelino et al. (2006), [53] Orosz et al. (2011b), [54] Homan et al. (2006b), [55] Remillard & McClintock (2006), [56] Gies & Bolt n (1982), [57] Cowley et al. (1983), [58]…”
DOUBLE COMPACT OBJECTS. I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMON ENVELOPE ON MERGER RATES (2012, methodology): “This was done in order to account for the observed masses of known BHs in the Milky Way (e.g. Orosz et al. (2011)).”
Born–Infeld inspired modifications of gravity (2017, background): “With the recent detection of gravitational waves ascribed to black hole merger processes by the LIGO collaboration [2]34, which is added to the classical observations from compact X-ray sources (with Cygnus X-1 as the first historical and most influential example [286]), the astrophysics of compact ”
X-ray variability of 104 active galactic nuclei - XMM-Newton power-spectrum density profiles (2012, methodology): “9 We used the black hole mass ofMBH = 15 ± 1M⊙ recently presented by Orosz et al. (2011).”
Microarcsecond Radio Astrometry (2013, background): “Knowing the distance to the binary removed the mass–distance degeneracy that limited the modeling of optical/IR data (light and velocity curves) and revealed that the unseen companion in Cyg X-1 has a mass of 14.8 ± 1.0 M (Orosz et al. 2011).”
THE TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX OF CYGNUS X-1 (2011, background): “Using the accurate distance, D, reported here, we have constructed such a model and obtained precise values for the mass, M, of the BH, the orbital inclination angle, i, and other system parameters, as reported in Paper II (Orosz et al. 2011).”
Ultraluminous X-ray sources in the Chandra and XMM-Newton era (2011, background): “In the Milky Way, the most massive sMBHs are those in GRS 1915+ 05 (M = 14.0 ± 4.4 M⊙; Harlaftis & Greiner 2004) and in Cygnus X-1 (M = 14.8±1.0 M⊙; Orosz et al. 2011).”
Rates of compact object coalescences (2021, background): “Thirdly, the future evolution of such systems is sensitive to assumptions about the dynamical stability of any future mass transfer episodes (van den Heuvel et al., 2017), the amount of mass loss in winds (cf. Belczynski et al. 2011 and Neijssel et al. 2021 for the case of Cygnus X-1), and the remna”
Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets (2013, background): “In determining the spins of eight of the ten black holes (see Section 6), it is assumed that the plane of the inner X-ray-emitting portion of the disk is aligned with the binary orbital plane, whose inclination angle i is determined from optical observations (e.g., Orosz et al. 2011a).”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, methodology): “Employing a new distance derived using radio parallax measurements [291], and improved binary system parameters ([299]; however,”
Forming short-period Wolf–Rayet X-ray binaries and double black holes through stable mass transfer (2017, background): “…one week. c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 An example of a system that will survive SS433-like evolution is Cygnus X-1, which has 5.6 day orbital period, a 14.8± 1.0 M black hole and a 19.2± 1.9 M donor, which according to its luminosity must have started out as a 30 M star (Orosz et al. 2011).”
Superradiance (2015, unknown): “2 UA ∼ 3 × 1010 m [674].”
THE EXTREME SPIN OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1 (2011, methodology): “ModelC gives a poorer fit to the data (∆χ2 ≈ 13), and it results in disharmony between the light-curve and velocity data on the one hand, and the radius and rotational velocity of the O-star on the other (see Table 1 in Orosz et al. 2011).”