paper

Black Holes Admitting Strong Resonant Phenomena

arXiv:0812.4418

Abstract

High-frequency twin peak quasiperiodic oscillations (QPOs) are observed in four microquasars, i.e., Galactic black hole binary systems, with frequency ratio very close to 3:2. In the microquasar GRS 1915+105, the structure of QPOs exhibits additional frequencies, and more than two frequencies are observed in the Galaxy nuclei Sgr A*, or in some extragalactic sources (NGC 4051, MCG-6-30-15 and NGC 5408 X-1). The observed QPOs can be explained by a variety of the orbital resonance model versions assuming resonance of oscillations with the Keplerian frequency or the vertical epicyclic frequency, and the radial epicyclic frequency, or some combinations of these frequencies. Generally, different resonances could arise at different radii of an accretion disc. However, we have shown that for special values of dimensionless black hole spin strong resonant phenomena could occur when different resonances can be excited at the same radius, as cooperative phenomena between the resonances may work in such situations. The special values of black hole spin are determined for triple frequency ratio sets ν_{K} : ν_θ : ν_{r} = s:t:u with s, t, u being small integers. The most promising example of such a special situation arises for black holes with extraordinary resonant spin a = 0.983 at the radius r = 2.395 M, where ν_{K} : ν_θ : ν_{r} = 3:2:1. We also predict that when combinations of the orbital frequencies are allowed, QPOs with four frequency ratio set 4:3:2:1 could be observed in the field of black holes with a = 0.866, 0.882 and 0.962. Assuming the extraordinary resonant spin a = 0.983 in Sgr A*, its QPOs with observed frequency ratio very close to 3:2:1 imply the black hole mass in the interval 4.3 x 10^6 M_sun < M < 5.4 x 10^6 M_sun, in agreement with estimates given by other, independent, observations.

17 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Acta Astronomica

References in corpus (7)