Evolution of the Accretion Disk–Corona during the Bright Hard-to-soft State Transition: A Reflection Spectroscopic Study with GX 339–4

Sridhar, Navin; García, Javier A.; Steiner, James F.; Connors, Riley; Grinberg, V.; Harrison, Fiona A.

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab64f5

Cited by 33 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 115 publications

(163 reference statements)

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“…However, we do nonetheless see the continuing evolution of the coronal temperature, from high to low, and most importantly, we have shown that reflection modeling of this kind demonstrates the clear luminosity dependence: a more luminous corona is a cooler corona. Sridhar et al (2020) recently explored the evolution of GX 339−4 in transition from the hard to the soft state, using a similar type of detailed analysis of its reflection properties. They showed that the inner disk radius remains constant during the transition, having approached the ISCO during the bright hard state.…”

Section: The Evolution Of Xte J1550−564mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for Returning Disk Radiation in the Black Hole X-Ray Binary XTE J1550–564

Connors

García

Dauser

et al. 2020

ApJ

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We explore the accretion properties of the black hole X-ray binary XTE J1550−564 during its outbursts in 1998/99 and 2000. We model the disk, corona, and reflection components of X-ray spectra taken with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), using the relxill suite of reflection models. The key result of our modeling is that the reflection spectrum in the very soft state is best explained by disk self-irradiation, i.e., photons from the inner disk are bent by the strong gravity of the black hole, and reflected off the disk surface. This is the first known detection of thermal disk radiation reflecting off the inner disk. There is also an apparent absorption line at ∼ 6.9 keV which may be evidence of an ionized disk wind. The coronal electron temperature (kT e ) is, as expected, lower in the brighter outburst of 1998/99, explained qualitatively by more efficient coronal cooling due to irradiating disk photons. The disk inner radius is consistent with being within a few times the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) throughout the bright-hard-to-soft states (10s of r g in gravitational units). The disk inclination is low during the hard state, disagreeing with the binary inclination value, and very close to 90 • in the soft state, recovering to a lower value when adopting a blackbody spectrum as the irradiating continuum.

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Section: The Evolution Of Xte J1550−564mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for Returning Disk Radiation in the Black Hole X-Ray Binary XTE J1550–564

Connors

García

Dauser

et al. 2020

ApJ

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“…During the high soft state, the inner disc could extend into the ISCO (Plant, et al 2014). Recently, Sridhar, et al (2020) found that the truncation radius remains low (< 9r g ) throughout the bright intermediate state (i.e., the width of the Fe K emission line is nearly constant throughout this transition indicating a quasi-static truncation radius). The evolution of the accretion disc during the intermediate state then should be driven by the variation in accretion rate rather than by the changes in truncation radius.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…also reported this tight correlation in GX 339-4. Sridhar, et al (2020) found that the temperatures of both inner disc and corona are sensitive to the luminosity of state transition.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of the truncated disc and inner hot-flow of GX 339–4

Chainakun

Luangtip

Young

et al. 2021

A&A

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Aims. We study the changes in geometry of the truncated disc and the inner hot-flow of GX 339-4 by analyzing the Power Spectral Density (PSD) extracted from six XMM-Newton observations taken at the very end of an outburst. Methods. A theoretical model of the PSD of GX 339-4 in the 0.3-0.7 keV (thermal reverberation dominated) and 0.7-1.5 keV (disc continuum dominated) energy bands is developed. The model assumes the standard accretion disc to be truncated at a specific radius, inside of which are two distinct hot-flow zones: one spectrally soft and the other spectrally hard. The effects of disc-fluctuations and thermal reverberation are taken into account. Results. This model successfully produces the traditional bumpy PSD profiles and provides good fits to the GX 339-4 data. The truncation radius is found to increase from r trc ∼ 10 to 55r g as the source luminosity decreases, strongly confirming that the truncation radius can be characterized as a function of luminosity. Keeping in mind the large uncertainty in previous measurements of the truncation radius, our values are larger than some obtained from spectroscopic analysis, but smaller than those implied from reverberation lag analysis. Furthermore, the size of two inner hot-flow zones which are spectrally hard and spectrally soft are also growing from ∼ 5 to 27r g and from ∼ 3 to 26r g , respectively, as the flux decreases. We find that the radial range of inner hard zone is always larger than the range of the soft hot-flow zone, but by a comparatively small factor of ∼ 1.1-2.2

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“…Hence, we consider this not to imprint a significant impact on our results and, if anything, it would enhance the difference between the observed AGN and XRB Γ distributions, strengthening our results. Moreover, Sridhar et al (2020) recently performed a detailed characterisation of the reflection features across the hard-to-soft transition of the 2002 and 2004 outbursts in GX 339−4. With respect to the total of 14 observations they used to sample SS02 and SS04, we only shared five, namely Obs.…”

Section: Possible Biases: X-ray Reflectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The former two in SS02 were defined as SIMSs by Belloni et al (2005) from timing analysis constraints and were included in our selection, while the latter in SS04 were included with our selection criterion following Belloni et al (2006). The remaining states in Sridhar et al (2020) were instead defined either as hard or as hard-intermediate states by Belloni et al, therefore they were not analysed in this work.…”

Section: Possible Biases: X-ray Reflectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do stellar-mass and super-massive black holes have similar dining habits?

Arcodia

Ponti

Merloni

et al. 2020

A&A

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Over the years, numerous attempts have been made to connect the phenomenology and physics of mass accretion onto stellar-mass and super-massive black holes in a scale-invariant fashion. In this paper, we explore this connection at the radiatively efficient (and non-jetted) end of accretion modes by comparing the relationship between the luminosity of the accretion disc and corona in the two source classes. Motivated by the apparently tight relationship between these two quantities in active galactic nuclei (AGNs), we analyse 458 RXTE-PCA archival observations of the X-ray binary (XRB) GX 339–4, using this object as an exemplar for the properties of XRBs in general. We focus on the soft and soft-intermediate states, which have been suggested to be analogous to radiatively efficient AGNs. The observed scatter in the log Ldisc − log Lcorona relationship of GX 339–4 is high (∼0.43 dex) and significantly larger than in a representative sample of radiatively efficient, non- or weakly jetted AGNs (∼0.30 dex). At first glance, this would appear contrary to the hypothesis that the systems simply scale with mass. On the other hand, we also find that GX 339–4 and our AGN sample show different accretion rate and power-law index distributions, with the latter in particular being broader in GX 339–4 (dispersion of ∼0.16 cf. ∼0.08 for AGN). GX 339–4 also shows an overall softer slope, with a mean value of ∼2.20 as opposed to ∼2.07 for the AGN sample. Remarkably, once similarly broad Γ and ṁ distributions are selected, the AGN sample overlaps nicely with GX 339–4 observations in the mass-normalised log Ldisc − log Lcorona plane, with a scatter of ∼0.30 − 0.33 dex in both cases. This indicates that a mass-scaling of properties might hold after all, with our results being consistent with the disc-corona systems in AGNs and XRBs exhibiting the same physical processes, albeit under different conditions for instance in terms of temperature, optical depth and/or electron energy distribution in the corona, heating-cooling balance, coronal geometry and/or black hole spin.

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Evolution of the Accretion Disk–Corona during the Bright Hard-to-soft State Transition: A Reflection Spectroscopic Study with GX 339–4

Cited by 33 publications

References 115 publications

Evidence for Returning Disk Radiation in the Black Hole X-Ray Binary XTE J1550–564

Evidence for Returning Disk Radiation in the Black Hole X-Ray Binary XTE J1550–564

Evolution of the truncated disc and inner hot-flow of GX 339–4

Do stellar-mass and super-massive black holes have similar dining habits?

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