Precise mass and spin measurements for a stellar-mass black hole through X-ray timing: the case of GRO J1655-40

By S. Motta, T. Belloni, L. Stella, T. Muñoz-Darias, Robert P. Fender. 2013

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a systematic analysis of the fast time variability properties of the transient black hole binary GRO J1655-40, based on the complete set of RossiXTE observations. We demonstrate that the frequencies of the quasi-periodic oscillations and of the broad band noise components and their variations match accurately the strong field general relativistic frequencies of particle motion in the close vicinity of the innermost stable circular orbit, as predicted by the relativistic precession model. We obtain high precision measurements of the black hole mass (M = (5.31 +/- 0.07) M solar masses, consistent with the value from optical/NIR observations) and spin (a/M = 0.290 +/- 0.003), through the sole use of X-ray timing.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2727b5cf921db314398502ae5a6b9e4fea5c5f8

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Citations in the corpus

Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, methodology): “In Bambi (2015a), I studied the constraints on the JP deformation parameter 3 for the BH candidate in GRO J1655-40 assuming the relativistic precession model of Motta et al. (2014).”
COMPACT BINARY MERGER RATES: COMPARISON WITH LIGO/VIRGO UPPER LIMITS (2015, methodology): “We chose this model as this mass was later confirmed by X-ray timing analysis (Motta et al. 2014; 5.31± 0.07 M⊙).”
A quasi-periodic modulation of the iron line centroid energy in the black hole binary H1743−322 (2016, methodology): “…this class of QPOs in general are driven by Lense–Thirring precession, and therefore supporting studies that measure black hole mass and spin using the period of the Type-C QPO in combination with that of highfrequency QPOs (Ingram & Motta 2014; Motta et al. 2014; Fragile, Straub & Blaes 2016).”
A review of quasi-periodic oscillations from black hole X-ray binaries: Observation and theory (2019, background): “4), showed two clear simultaneous peaks [212, 158], which however appear in two different energy bands (the lower peak is visible at low energies, i.”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “003 has been reported, assuming the QPOs arise via the relativistic precession mechanism [316].”