A PARALLAX DISTANCE TO THE MICROQUASAR GRS 1915+105 AND A REVISED ESTIMATE OF ITS BLACK HOLE MASS

By M. J. Reid, J. E. McClintock, J. Steiner, D. Steeghs, Ronald A. Remillard, V. Dhawan, Ramesh Narayan. 2014

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using the Very Long Baseline Array, we have measured a trigonometric parallax for the microquasar GRS 1915+105, which contains a black hole and a K-giant companion. This yields a direct distance estimate of kpc and a revised estimate for the mass of the black hole of M☉. GRS 1915+105 is at about the same distance as some H ii regions and water masers associated with high-mass star formation in the Sagittarius spiral arm of the Galaxy. The absolute proper motion of GRS 1915+105 is −3.19 ± 0.03 mas yr−1 and −6.24 ± 0.05 mas yr−1 toward the east and north, respectively, which corresponds to a modest peculiar speed of 22 ± 24 km s−1 at the parallax distance, suggesting that the binary did not receive a large velocity kick when the black hole formed. On one observational epoch, GRS 1915+105 displayed superluminal motion along the direction of its approaching jet. Considering previous observations of jet motions, the jet in GRS 1915+105 can be modeled with a jet inclination to the line of sight of 60° ± 5° and a variable flow speed between 0.65c and 0.81c, which possibly indicates deceleration of the jet at distances from the black hole ≳ 2000 AU. Finally, using our measurements of distance and estimates of black hole mass and inclination, we provisionally confirm our earlier result that the black hole is spinning very rapidly.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76eb7adf5f5d83c657709c056abb7f24d837972d

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

COMPACT BINARY MERGER RATES: COMPARISON WITH LIGO/VIRGO UPPER LIMITS (2015, background): “This is especially timely as several recent studies on BH natal kicks have recently appeared (e.g., Wong et al. 2014; Reid et al. 2014; Repetto & Nelemnas 2015; Mandel 2016).”
Testing the Kerr Black Hole Hypothesis Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy (2016, methodology): “Here we use the more recent measurements reported in Reid et al. (2014): = - +M 12.4 1.8 2.0 Me and = - +D 8.6 1.6 2.0 kpc. edge is closer to the black hole, the signature of the strong gravity effects in the reflection spectrum are larger, and it may be possible that small differences in the…”
WATCHDOG: A COMPREHENSIVE ALL-SKY DATABASE OF GALACTIC BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES (2015, methodology): “A trigonometric parallax measurement by Reid et al. (2014) on the system yielded a direct distance measurement and a revised estimate for BH mass. 2.2.71.”