STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLE SPIN CONSTRAINTS FROM DISK REFLECTION AND CONTINUUM MODELING

By J. Miller, C. Reynolds, A. C. Fabian, G. Miniutti, L. J. U. O. Michigan, U. Maryland, U. Cambridge, Laboratoire ApC, Laeff, Saint Mary's University. 2009

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accretion disk reflection spectra, including broad iron emission lines, bear the imprints of the strong Doppler shifts and gravitational redshifts close to black holes. The extremity of these shifts depends on the proximity of the innermost stable circular orbit to the black hole, and that orbit is determined by the black hole spin parameter. Modeling relativistic spectral features, then, gives a means of estimating black hole spin. We report on the results of fits made to archival X-ray spectra of stellar-mass black holes and black hole candidates, selected for strong disk reflection features. Following recent work, these spectra were fit with reflection models and disk continuum emission models (where required) in which black hole spin is a free parameter. Although our results must be regarded as preliminary, we find evidence for a broad range of black hole spin parameters in our sample. The black holes with the most relativistic radio jets are found to have high spin parameters, though jets are observed in a black hole with a low spin parameter. For those sources with constrained binary system parameters, we examine the distribution of spin parameters versus black hole mass, binary mass ratio, and orbital period. We discuss the results within the context of black hole creation events, relativistic jet production, and efforts to probe the innermost relativistic regime around black holes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffd6a9c5c9de1c3a71f125d449d0719446f438cb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

The spin of the black hole microquasar XTE J1550−564 via the continuum-fitting and Fe-line methods (2010, methodology): “The spin values of several stellar BHs (Blum et al. 2009; Miller et al. 2009b; Reis et al. 2009, 2011) and supermassive BHs (Brenneman & Reynolds 2006; Fabian et al. 2009; Miniutti et al. 2009; Schmoll et al. 2009; Zoghbi et al. 2010) have been reported using the Fe-line method with values ranging…”
THE CONSTANT INNER-DISK RADIUS OF LMC X-3: A BASIS FOR MEASURING BLACK HOLE SPIN (2010, methodology): “In recent years, both methods have been used to estimate the spins of stellar BHs (e.g., Shafee et al. 2006; McClintock et al. 2006; Davis et al. 2006; Reis et al. 2008; Miller et al. 2009; Blum et al. 2009).”
Measuring the spins of accreting black holes (2011, background): “An early suggestion of high spins for two black holes was made by Miller et al (2004, 2002) and preliminary results for a total of eight stellar-mass black holes are given in Miller et al (2009).”
Broad emission lines for a negatively spinning black hole (2010, background): “…of AGN and Galactic black holes have already resulted in several measurements ofa with formally small error bars (Brenneman & Reynolds 2006; Miller et al. 2004, 2008, 2009), with systematic effects due to the high count rate of Galactic sources (Yamada et al. 2009; Done & Diaz Trigo 2010)…”
Precise mass and spin measurements for a stellar-mass black hole through X-ray timing: the case of GRO J1655-40 (2013, background): “Previous estimates of the spin of the BH in GRO 1655–40 were based on X-ray spectral analysis and gave higher, and yet different, values (e.g. a = 0.65– 0.75, (Shafee et al. 2006); a = 0.94–0.98, (Miller et al. 2009); a = 0.9, (Reis et al. 2009) affected by larger uncertainties.”
THE EXTREME SPIN OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1 (2011, methodology): “The near-zero spin result of Miller et al. (2009) is further called into question because no data above 10 keV were used.”
Measuring Black Hole Spin Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy (2013, methodology): “Miller et al. (2009) apply the reflection method to ASCA/GIS data for this object, using the standard reflionx (Ross & Fabian 2005) ionized reflection model, and find a spin slightly above the upper end of the CF range, a = 0.76±0.01.”
Multi-resonance orbital model of high-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations: possible high-precision determination of black hole and neutron star spin (2013, background): “…2006; Shafee et al. 2006) and profiled spectral lines (Laor 1991; Bao & Stuchlík 1992; Karas et al. 1992; Dov̌ciak et al. 2004; Fabian & Miniutti 2005; Zakharov 2003;̌Cadež et al. 2003; Fanton et al. 1997;Čadež & Calvani 2005; Zakharov & Repin 2006; Schee & Stuchlík 2009a,b; Miller et al. 2009).”
THE FUNDAMENTAL PLANE OF ACCRETION ONTO BLACK HOLES WITH DYNAMICAL MASSES (2009, background): “The high flux of stellar-mass black holes facilitates spin constraints with current X-ray observatories; in those systems, the most relativistic jets appear to be launched by black holes with high spin parameters (Miller et al. 2009).”
Broad iron L line and X-ray reverberation in 1H0707-495 (2009, methodology): “…from Brenneman & Reynolds (2006) gives a spin parameter a > 0.976 at 90 per cent confidence (where a is the dimensionless parameter a = cJ/GM2, with J being the angular momentum of a black hole of mass M , see Miller et al. 2009 for spin measurements using this method for stellar mass black holes).”
No evidence for black hole spin powering of jets in X-ray binaries (2010, background): “Interestingly, two of the sources which lie significantly below the correlation, i.e. are apparently ’radio quiet’, have spin measurements report d by Miller et al. (2009).”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, methodology): “In contrast, spin estimates based on fits to spectra obtained in the low/hard state using the XMM-Newton/EPIC-pn CCD camera suggested a very low spin [257].”
THE FIRST ACCURATE PARALLAX DISTANCE TO A BLACK HOLE (2009, background): “Better distance constraints will allow for improved comparisons with spins derived via fitting the general relativistic distortions in disk reflection lines (e.g., Miller et al. 2009), providing further insights into the generation and distribution of black hole spins.”