Mass Measurements of Stellar and Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

By J. Casares, Peter G. Jonker. Space Science Reviews, 2013

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the method, and potential systematic effects therein, used for measuring the mass of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We restrict our discussion to the method that relies on the validity of Kepler’s laws; we refer to this method as the dynamical method. We briefly discuss the implications of the mass distribution of stellar-mass black holes and provide an outlook for future measurements. Further, we investigate the evidence for the existence of intermediate-mass black holes i.e. black holes with masses above 100 M⊙, the limit to the black hole mass that can be produced by stellar evolution in the current Universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8571062f263640fae26af8d7b2bec315631cdc68

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michela Mapelli
2. Ilya Mandel
3. D. Holz
4. Mario Spera
5. N. Giacobbo
6. Bernard F. Schutz
7. T. Bulik
8. R. O’Shaughnessy

In Instrumentation

1. Ilya Mandel
2. D. Holz
3. Michela Mapelli
4. E. Thrane
5. T. Bulik
6. Vicky Kalogera
7. Cosimo Bambi
8. W. Farr

Citations in the corpus

• Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, background): “The key-quantity is the mass function (Casares & Jonker, 2014) f(M) = K3cT 2πGN = M3 sin3 i (M +Mc) 2 , (8) where Kc = vc sin i is the maximum line-of-sight Doppler velocity of the companion star, vc is the velocity of the 4 In alternative theories of gravity, this bound may somewhat change…”
• BlackCAT: A catalogue of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray transients (2015, background): “Unlike Özel et al. (2010, 2012), here we only show with solid A61, page 7 of 20 A&A 587, A61 (2016) circles those systems with the most reliable mass determinations following Casares & Jonker (2014).”
• The spin of the second-born black hole in coalescing binary black holes (2018, background): “Many BHs exist in binary systems with non-degenerate companion stars, for example, X-ray binaries, which makes it possible to obtain the BH’s properties indirectly (McClintock 2006; McClintock et al. 2014; Reynolds 2014; Casares & Jonker 2014; Miller & Miller 2015).”
• Binary Black Hole Mergers in the First Advanced LIGO Observing Run (2016, background): “[85] J.”
• Very massive stars, pair-instability supernovae and intermediate-mass black holes with the sevn code (2017, background): “Dynamical mass measurements in X-ray binaries, possible only for about a dozen of BHs, suggest a dearth of stellar BHs with mass & 15 M (Farr et al. 2011; Casares & Jonker 2014).”
• Phenomenological aspects of black holes beyond general relativity (2018, methodology): “The electromagnetic radiation coming from the luminous star can be used in order to deduce the mass of its companion through the so-called mass function [92, 93], which in the case of A0620-00 yields 6.”