A Long, Hard Look at the Low/Hard State in Accreting Black Holes

By J. Miller, J. Homan, D. Steeghs, M. Rupen, R. Hunstead, R. Wijnands, P. Charles, A. B. U. O. Michigan, Mit, CfA and 6 more. 2006

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first results of coordinated multiwavelength observations of the Galactic black hole GX 339-4 in a canonical low/hard state, obtained during its 2004 outburst. XMM-Newton observed the source for two revolutions, or approximately 280 ks; RXTE monitored the source throughout this long stare. The resulting data offer the best view yet obtained of the inner accretion flow geometry in the low/hard state, which is thought to be analogous to the geometry in low-luminosity active galactic nuclei. The XMM-Newton spectra clearly reveal the presence of a cool accretion disk component and a relativistic Fe K emission line. The results of fits made to both components strongly suggest that a standard thin disk remains at or near to the innermost stable circular orbit, at least in bright phases of the low/hard state. These findings indicate that potential links between the inner disk radius and the onset of a steady compact jet, and the paradigm of a radially recessed disk in the low/hard state, do not hold universally. The results of our observations can best be explained if a standard thin accretion disk fuels a corona that is closely related to, or consistent with, the base of a compact jet. In a brief examination of archival data, we show that Cygnus X-1 supports this picture of the low/hard state. We discuss our results within the context of disk-jet connections and prevailing models for accretion onto black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Radiation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89c49f7a7055c17c6875ffed42cd628d68cfd317

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Citations in the corpus

On the origin of radio emission in radio-quiet quasars (2008, background): “…and thus if it harbours an optically thick accretion disc, as indicated by observations of a broad fluorescence iron Kα line in other lowstate GBHs (Miller et al. 2006b; Rykoff et al. 2007; but see counter arguments for a truncated inner disc in a review by Done, Gierliński & Kubota 2007,…”
Black hole accretion discs in the canonical low‐hard state (2009, background): “5−0127 0.198+0.004−0.005 1.610+0.006−0.008 0.0573+0.0005−0.0006 0.25 ± 0.01 0.006 ± 0.002 1970.4/1497 J1655−40 0.63 ± 0.02 1.67 ± 0.01 0.133 ± 0.002 0.20 ± 0.01 0.096+0.047−0.036 1618.9/1439 J1118+480 0.023 ± 0.003 1.69 ± 0.01 0.186 ± 0.003 0.199+0.006−0.007 0.135+0.03−0.02 3744.9/4246 J17497−2821 4”
Evaluating Spectral Models and the X-Ray States of Neutron Star X-Ray Transients (2007, background): “Such disks have in fact been observed in the hard state of a number of BH Xray transients (Miller et al. 2006a,b; Rykoff et al. 2007), with instruments that have better sensitivity at low energies than RXTE.”
Piecing together the X-ray background : bolometric corrections for active galactic nuclei (2007, methodology): “We use fits to RXTE, Integral and BeppoSAX data on the GBH GX 339-4, provided by Miller et al. (2006), Corongiu et al. (2003) (hard state), Belloni et al. (2006) (soft intermediate/thermal state) and Miller et al. (2004) (SPL state) to calculate bolometric corrections.”
Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, methodology): “Miller et al. 2006 (see also Reis et al. 2008) had previously claimed that the data indicated an extremely broad iron line.”
Rapid optical and X-ray timing observations of GX 339-4: multi-component optical variability in the low/hard state (2010, background): “It was one of the first to show clear evidence of the existence of an inner accretion disc in the X-ray low/hard state (Miller et al. 2006).”
Modelling the behaviour of accretion flows in X-ray binaries (2007, methodology): “13 (right panel, marked as m) shows diskbb normalization from the power-law continuum fit to XMM-Newton/RXTE data of 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.”
STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLE SPIN CONSTRAINTS FROM DISK REFLECTION AND CONTINUUM MODELING (2009, methodology): “This condition likely holds for the range of outburst phases covered in this work, including relatively low accretion rates in the low/hard state (see Miller et al. 2006b; Rykoff et al. 2007).”
A systematic look at the Very High and Low/Hard state of GX 339-4: Constraining the black hole spin with a new reflection model (2008, methodology): “In this paper we undertake a systematic reanalysis of the VHS and LHS of GX 339-4, as reported by Miller et al. (2004, 2006).”
IMPROVED REFLECTION MODELS OF BLACK HOLE ACCRETION DISKS: TREATING THE ANGULAR DISTRIBUTION OF X-RAYS (2013, background): “…& Reynolds 2006; Dauser et al. 2012; Fabian et al. 2012b; Gallo et al. 2011; Ponti et al. 2010; Brenneman et al. 2011, 2013; Duro et al. 2011; Miller et al. 2006; Reis et al. 2008) have revealed a steeper emissivity at the inner parts of the accretion disk than the canonically assumed r−3…”
The 'universal' radio/X-ray flux correlation : the case study of the black hole GX 339-4 (2012, methodology): “All observations have been conducted by us, with the exception of four observations (PI: M. Rupen) in March 2004 (briefly mentioned in Miller et al. 2006).”
Accretion disc variability in the hard state of black hole X-ray binaries (2009, background): “…expected blackbody components, together with relativistically broadened reflection features, which have been used to argue that the disc is truncated at significantly smaller radii than previously thought, perhaps only a few gravitational radii (Miller et al. 2006; Miller, Homan, & Miniutti 2006).”
Jets from black hole X-ray binaries: testing, refining and extending empirical models for the coupling to X-rays (2009, background): “The 2004–05 outburst of GX 339-4 did not receive much radio coverage, with Miller et al. (2006) publishing the only radio detection.”