Black Hole Binaries

By J. E. McClintock, Ronald A. Remillard. 2003

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We review the properties of 40 X-ray binaries that contain either a confirmed black hole or a black hole candidate. After discussing briefly the significance of these Galactic black holes to both astronomy and physics, we present basic data for all 40 systems, review the physics of mass accretion onto black holes, and then show seven-year light curves of 20 systems. The second half of this work is a far-reaching review of the canonical emission states of black hole binaries, which is based on X-ray, radio and gamma-ray data. For several selected black holes, we show 33 pairs of X-ray energy and power density spectra and use these spectra as a basis for introducing modified definitions of the canonical X-ray emission states of an accreting black hole. We highlight the physical structures and some of the emission mechanisms associated with each emission state. In the final pages we examine both low- and high-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations. A recurring theme of the review is the importance of these black holes as potential sites for tests of general relativity. Accordingly, we stress phenomena that originate in strong gravity, such as relativistic Fe emission lines and thermal continuum emission, both of which arise in the inner accretion disk. Especially important in this regard are the high-frequency (40-450 Hz) quasi-periodic oscillations observed for seven black holes, three of which show evidence for commensurate (3:2) pairs of frequencies.

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating Spectral Models and the X-Ray States of Neutron Star X-Ray Transients (2007, background): “…detailed studies of a large number of observations from a single outburst of a NS X-ray transient (Gierliński & Done 2002b; Maccarone & Coppi 2003b; Maitra & Bailyn 2004), (3) Fourier frequency resolved Xray spectroscopy (Gilfanov et al. 2003; Olive et al. 2003), and (4) comparisons of spectral…”
Testing Accretion Disk Theory in Black Hole X-Ray Binaries (2006, background): “Black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) are known to occupy distinct spectral states which can be characterized by the relative contribution of thermal and non-thermal emission components (e.g. McClintock & Remillard 2004).”
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): “The apparent inconsistency in their results can be attributed to the use of PEXRIV (Magdziarz & Zdziarski 1995) as the reflection model.”
Fluorescent iron lines as a probe of astrophysical black hole systems (2002, background): “On the observational side, it should be noted that the broad line in MCG–6-30-15 [214] is well resolved by the ASCA SIS (the instrumental resolution is about 150 eV at these energies) and it would be obvious if it were due to several separate and well-spaced lines spread over 2 keV.”
The Evolution of Black Hole States (2004, background): “McClintock and Remillard (2004) introduced a new classification scheme that is partly based on the old five-states scheme, but no longer uses luminosity as a selection criterion since it appeared that any of the active states may occur at any luminosity.”