Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets

By J. E. McClintock, Ramesh Narayan, J. Steiner. Space Science Reviews, 2013

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The spins of ten stellar black holes have been measured using the continuum-fitting method. These black holes are located in two distinct classes of X-ray binary systems, one that is persistently X-ray bright and another that is transient. Both the persistent and transient black holes remain for long periods in a state where their spectra are dominated by a thermal accretion disk component. The spin of a black hole of known mass and distance can be measured by fitting this thermal continuum spectrum to the thin-disk model of Novikov and Thorne; the key fit parameter is the radius of the inner edge of the black hole’s accretion disk. Strong observational and theoretical evidence links the inner-disk radius to the radius of the innermost stable circular orbit, which is trivially related to the dimensionless spin parameter a∗ of the black hole (|a∗|<1). The ten spins that have so far been measured by this continuum-fitting method range widely from a∗≈0 to a∗>0.95. The robustness of the method is demonstrated by the dozens or hundreds of independent and consistent measurements of spin that have been obtained for several black holes, and through careful consideration of many sources of systematic error. Among the results discussed is a dichotomy between the transient and persistent black holes; the latter have higher spins and larger masses. Also discussed is recently discovered evidence in the transient sources for a correlation between the power of ballistic jets and black hole spin.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed5cea1abf799fb6ee47194ca0d68812dcc41e9c

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Citations in the corpus

• Testing the nature of dark compact objects: a status report (2019, methodology): “Another approach is the study of the thermal component of the spectrum from stellar-mass BHs using the so-called continuumfitting method (Li et al. 2005; McClintock et al. 2014; Reynolds 2014), which can provide information about the ISCO location and hence the BH spin (McClintock et al.”
• Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, methodology): “The continuum-fitting method consists of the analysis of the thermal spectrum of geometrically thin and optically thick accretion disks (Li et al., 2005; McClintock et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 1997).”
• The spin of the second-born black hole in coalescing binary black holes (2018, background): “Many BHs exist in binary systems with non-degenerate companion stars, for example, X-ray binaries, which makes it possible to obtain the BH’s properties indirectly (McClintock 2006; McClintock et al. 2014; Reynolds 2014; Casares & Jonker 2014; Miller & Miller 2015).”
• A new route towards merging massive black holes (2016, background): “So far, the measured masses of observed stellar-mass BHs are all relatively low: 4−16 M for all the Galactic sources (McClintock et al. 2014), about 16 M for M33 X-7 (Orosz et al. 2007) and 24−33 M for IC 10 X1 (Prestwich et al. 2007).”