No evidence for black hole spin powering of jets in X-ray binaries

By Robert P. Fender, E. Gallo, D. Russell. 2010

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we consider the reported measurements of black hole spin for black hole X-ray binaries and compare them against the measurements of jet power and speed across all accretion states in these systems. We find no evidence for any correlation between the properties of the jets and the reported spin measurements. These constraints are strongest in the hard X-ray state, which is associated with a continuous powerful jet. We are led to conclude that one or more of the following is correct: (i) the calculated jet power and speed measurements are wrong, (ii) the reported spin measurements are wrong and (iii) there is no strong dependence of the jet properties on the black hole spin. In addition to this lack of observational evidence for a relation between the black hole spin and jet properties in stellar mass black holes, we highlight the fact that there appear to be at least three different ways in which the jet power and/or radiative efficiency from a black hole X-ray binary may vary, two of which are certainly independent of spin because they occur in the same source on relatively short time-scales and the third which does not correlate with any reported measurements of black hole spin. We briefly discuss how these findings may impact upon interpretations of populations of active galactic nuclei in the context of black hole spin and merger history.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0e137faed29a658e118be96a455fecd6f98d213

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring the spins of accreting black holes (2011, result): “In closing, we note that a statistical study by Fender et al (2010), which is based on data of uneven quality, found no evidence that black hole spin powers jets.”
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).”
Observational evidence for a correlation between jet power and black hole spin (2011, result): “The substantial difference between our results and those of Fender et al. (2010) is, in the end, determined by the choice of the quantity used to represent jet power.”
Investigating stellar‐mass black hole kicks (2012, background): “Evidence of highly rotating BHs comes from the properties of X-ray spectra of Galactic BH binaries (see for example Zhang et al. 1997, Laor 1991 and also Fender et al. 2010).”
Prograde and retrograde black holes: whose jet is more powerful? (2012, methodology): “…(AT) standing this is crucial, as the link between jet power and BH spin has been confirmed in BHBs (Narayan & McClintock 2012, but see Fender et al. 2010) and jet power is increasingly often used for inferring BH spin (Daly 2011; Martı́nez-Sansigre & Rawlings 2011; Buliga et al.…”
Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets (2013, background): “Based on an analysis of a heterogeneous data sample of uneven quality, Fender et al. (2010) claim that there is no evidence for a correlation between the power of ballistic jets and black hole spin.”