Observational evidence for a correlation between jet power and black hole spin

By Ramesh Narayan, J. E. McClintock. 2011

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that the 5-GHz radio flux of transient ballistic jets in black hole binaries correlates with the dimensionless black hole spin parameter a* estimated via the continuum-fitting method. The data suggest that jet power scales either as the square of a* or as the square of the angular velocity of the horizon ΩH. This is the first direct evidence that jets may be powered by black hole spin energy. The observed correlation validates the continuum-fitting method of measuring spin. In addition, for those black holes that have well-sampled radio observations of ballistic jets, the correlation may be used to obtain rough estimates of their spins.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82db92e0987f8315007df13a5db92f07b4368912

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Ramesh Narayan
2. A. Sa̧dowski
3. F. Yuan
4. J. Steiner
5. J. E. McClintock
6. Yucong Zhu
7. Jonathan M. Miller
8. R. Penna

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Ramesh Narayan
2. A. Sa̧dowski
3. F. Yuan
4. J. Steiner
5. J. E. McClintock
6. R. Penna
7. Yucong Zhu
8. M. Miller

Citations in the corpus

• Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets (2013, methodology): “Therein, they challenge the methodologies and findings of Narayan & McClintock (2012) and Steiner et al. (2013).”
• The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “t is correct, then proxies for jet power should be positively correlated with spin values. Based on very few sources, correlations between proxies for jet power and black hole spin have been claimed ([398]; however, other work suggests that the apparent relation is an artifact of selection effects ([”
• Energy, momentum and mass outflows and feedback from thick accretion discs around rotating black holes (2013, methodology): “Recently, it has been observed that the scaling of jet power with BH spin in galactic X-ray binaries is consistent with the BZ model (Narayan & McClintock 2012; Steiner, McClintock & Narayan 2013).”
• Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “A strong correlation has been seen in the case of episodic jets (Narayan & McClintock 2012, Steiner et al. 2013, McClintock et al. 2013; but see Fender et al. 2010, Russell et al. 2013a, who question the reality of the correlation).”