Measuring the spins of accreting black holes

By J. E. McClintock, Ramesh Narayan, S. Davis, Lijun Gou, A. Kulkarni, J. Orosz, R. Penna, Ronald A. Remillard, J. Steiner. 2011

258 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A typical galaxy is thought to contain tens of millions of stellar-mass black holes, the collapsed remnants of once massive stars, and a single nuclear supermassive black hole. Both classes of black holes accrete gas from their environments. The accreting gas forms a flattened orbiting structure known as an accretion disk. During the past several years, it has become possible to obtain measurements of the spins of the two classes of black holes by modeling the x-ray emission from their accretion disks. Two methods are employed, both of which depend upon identifying the inner radius of the accretion disk with the innermost stable circular orbit, whose radius depends only on the mass and spin of the black hole. In the Fe Kα method, which applies to both classes of black holes, one models the profile of the relativistically broadened iron line with a special focus on the gravitationally redshifted red wing of the line. In the continuum-fitting (CF) method, which has so far only been applied to stellar-mass black holes, one models the thermal x-ray continuum spectrum of the accretion disk. We discuss both methods, with a strong emphasis on the CF method and its application to stellar-mass black holes. Spin results for eight stellar-mass black holes are summarized. These data are used to argue that the high spins of at least some of these black holes are natal, and that the presence or absence of relativistic jets in accreting black holes is not entirely determined by the spin of the black hole.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd49424612e9099b01a1d041e11f9ee1a25ce6c1

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Citations in the corpus

Precise mass and spin measurements for a stellar-mass black hole through X-ray timing: the case of GRO J1655-40 (2013, methodology): “…et al. 2012; Miller et al. 2013), while in the continuum-fitting method the thermal X-ray continuum spectrum of the accretion disc is modelled (McClintock et al. 2011, 2013 for recent reviews and e.g. Shafee et al. 2006; Liu et al. 2008, Gou et al. 2009; Steiner et al. 2010; Steiner et al.…”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, background): “[11]; and formore technical details about the physics and astrophysics of gravitational waves we suggest the reviews by Blanchet [12] and Sathyaprakash and Schutz [13].”
Hierarchical analysis of gravitational-wave measurements of binary black hole spin–orbit misalignments (2017, background): “…et al. 2015; Mandel et al. 2017; Vitale et al. 2017) Stellar-mass BHs are expected to be born spinning, with observations suggesting their dimensionless spin parameters χ take the full range of allowed values between 0 and 1 (McClintock et al. 2011; Fragos & McClintock 2015; Miller & Miller 2015).”
Influence of Cosmic Repulsion and Magnetic Fields on Accretion Disks Rotating around Kerr Black Holes (2020, methodology): “The mass of the black holes in the microquasars are estimated by optical measurements based on the weak field gravity effects, being independent of the strong gravity effects that are governing the twin HF QPOs and profiled spectral lines or spectral continuum relevant in estimates of the spin of th”
Multi-resonance orbital model of high-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations: possible high-precision determination of black hole and neutron star spin (2013, methodology): “…based on various versions of the resonance model have to be compared with the spin estimates based on the accretion disc spectral continuum fitting (McClintock et al. 2011; Done & Davis 2008; Done et al. 2007; McClintock et al. 2006; Middleton et al. 2006; Shafee et al. 2006) and profiled spectral…”
Black holes in Einstein-aether and Hořava-Lifshitz gravity (2011, methodology): “The deviation of this quantity away from its GR value (2 · 6−3/2) is a measure of how easily ætheory (or HL gravity) might be discriminated from GR using the X-ray continuum spectra of accretion disks [34, 35] (see also Ref.”
Observational evidence for a correlation between jet power and black hole spin (2011, methodology): “The CF method (see McClintock et al. 2011, for a brief review) fits the X-ray continuum spectrum of an accreting stellar mass BH using the classic relativistic thin-disc model of Novikov & Thorne (1973).”
Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “In the case of BHBs, thanks to recent progress in measuring the spins of black holes (McClintock et al. 2011, 2013), it is now possible to check directly for a correlation between spin and jet power.”
THE FINAL SPIN FROM BINARY BLACK HOLES IN QUASI-CIRCULAR ORBITS (2016, background): “These range from modeling the GW fluxes throughout the binary’s evolution within the EOB model (e.g., by Damour & Nagar 2007, for nonspinning BHs) to approaches that combine information from PN theory, the extreme mass-ratio limit (EMRL), symmetry arguments, and fits to NR data, to provide “formulae”
Spinning gravitating objects in the effective field theory in the post-Newtonian scheme (2015, background): “Moreover, astrophysical observations indicate that such black hole components have near extreme spin [8].”
THE EXTREME SPIN OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1 (2011, methodology): “Spin measurements have previously been obtained using the continuum-fitting method for eight black holes (McClintock et al. 2011).”