Jet-dominated states: an alternative to advection across black hole event horizons in ‘quiescent’ X-ray binaries

By Robert P. Fender, E. Gallo, Peter G. Jonker. 2003

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We demonstrate that at relatively low mass accretion rates, black hole X-ray binaries should enter ‘jet-dominated’ states, in which the majority of the liberated accretion power is in the form of a (radiatively inefcient) jet and not dissipated as X-rays in the accretion o w. This result follows from the empirically established non-linear relation between radio and X-ray power from hard state black holes, which we assume also to hold for neutron stars. Conservative estimates of the jet power indicate that all ‘quiescent’ black holes should be in this jetdominated regime. In combination with an additional empirical result, namely that black hole X-ray binaries are more ‘radio loud’ than neutron stars, we nd that quiescent neutron stars should be up to two orders of magnitude more luminous in X-rays than the black hole systems, without requiring any signicant advection of energy into a black hole. This ratio is as observed, and such observations should therefore no longer be considered as direct evidence for the existence of black hole event horizons. Furthermore, even if black hole candidates do contain black holes with event horizons, this work demonstrates that there is no requirement for the advection of signicant amounts of accretion energy across the horizon.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd9094ffd700a05b918b6f61d67988bccecb16fa

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Robert P. Fender
2. Ramesh Narayan
3. T. Belloni
4. E. Koerding
5. F. Yuan
6. E. Gallo
7. A. Merloni
8. J. Homan

Citations in the corpus

• Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “However, the radiative luminosity may actually be larger than the kinetic outflow power for luminosities29 >∼ 10 −4LEdd (Fender et al. 2003).”
• WATCHDOG: A COMPREHENSIVE ALL-SKY DATABASE OF GALACTIC BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES (2015, background): “…of the energy releas d from the accreted material goes into the kinetic (and magnetic) energy of the jet rather than being radiated away (e.g., Fender et al. 2003), effectively resulting in a smaller contribution to accretion luminosity (and hence a lowerṀBH) than would be the case if the…”
• No evidence for black hole spin powering of jets in X-ray binaries (2010, background): “…or not such a step-up in jet power between hard states and transient jets existed was explored in FBG04 (their Fig 5), which shows that if the lower limit to jet power of Fender et al. (2003) is correct, then there maybe a boost of about an order of magnitude in jet power for the transient events.”
• The anti‐hierarchical growth of supermassive black holes (2004, background): “Whether such an output dominates the energy budget (according to the so-called ADIOS picture, Blandford & Begelman (1999), and as proposed also by Fender et al. 2003) or not depends, however, on the dynamics of the innermost disc–jet coupling and, from the observationally point of view, on the…”
• A radio-emitting outflow in the quiescent state of A0620−00: implications for modelling low-luminosity black hole binaries (2006, background): “…a non-linear radio/X-ray scaling down to low quiescent luminosities lends observational support tothe notion of ‘jet-dominated states’ as defined by Fender et al. (2003), i.e. a regime in which the energy carried off by an outflow – in the form of radiation, kinetic energy and Poynting flux –…”
• Global optical/infrared-X-ray correlations in X-ray binaries: quantifying disc and jet contributions (2006, background): “…inefficient (the majority of the liberated gravitational potential is carried in the flow and not radiated locally), where jet-dominated states can exist, whereas in NSXBs, the accretion is radiatively efficient, and jet-dominated states are unlikely to exist (see also Fender et al. 2003).”
• Radio sources in low-luminosity active galactic nuclei IV. Radio luminosity function, importance of jet power, and radio properties of the complete Palomar sample (2005, methodology): “This domination of jet power over X-ray emission is analogous to the situations for ∼10−15 M black holes in Galactic X-ray binary systems (Fender et al. 2003) and for powerful radio galaxies (e.g. Celotti & Fabian 1993; Owen et al. 2000).”
• Refining the fundamental plane of accreting black holes (2006, background): “As the disk fades, the system may become “jet-dominated” — meaning that the bulk of the energy output is in radiation and kinetic energy of thejet (Fender et al. 2003, FKM).”
• Black holes in general relativity (2009, unknown): “43 65 v3 [ gr -q c] 5 F eb 2 00 9”
• GRS 1915+105 and the Disc-Jet Coupling in Accreting Black Hole Systems (2004, background): “Esimates of the jet power in steady and transient phases are more recent (Corbel et al. 2003; Gallo et al. 2003; Fender et al. 2003, 2004b), as is the certainty that the transient jets are considerably more relativistic than the steady jets (Gallo et al. 2003, Fender et al. 2004b).”