Internal shocks driven by accretion flow variability in the compact jet of the black hole binary GX 339-4

Abstract

In recent years, compact jets have been playing a growing role in the understanding of accreting black hole engines. In the case of X-ray binary systems, compact jets are usually associated with the hard state phase of a source outburst. Recent observations of GX 339-4 have demonstrated the presence of a variable synchrotron spectral break in the mid-infrared band that was associated with its compact jet. In the model used in this study, we assume that the jet emission is produced by electrons accelerated in internal shocks driven by rapid fluctuations of the jet velocity. The resulting spectral energy distribution (SED) and variability properties are very sensitive to the Fourier power spectrum density (PSD) of the assumed fluctuations of the jet Lorentz factor. These fluctuations are likely to be triggered by the variability of the accretion flow which is best traced by the X-ray emission. Taking the PSD of the jet Lorentz factor fluctuations to be identical to the observed X-ray PSD, our study finds that the internal shock model successfully reproduces the radio to infrared SED of the source at the time of the observations as well as the reported strong mid-infrared spectral variability.

9 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (8)

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• Dark jets in the soft X-ray state of black hole binaries?
• Radio monitoring of transient Be/X-ray binaries and the inflow-outflow coupling of strongly-magnetized accreting neutron stars
• Testing jet geometries and disk-jet coupling in the neutron star LMXB 4U 0614+091 with the internal shocks model
• RMS-Flux Relation and Disc-Jet Connection in Blazars in the Context of the Internal Shocks Model
• Tracking optical variability and outflows across the accretion states of the black hole transient MAXI J1820+070
• The Effect of X-ray Irradiation on the Time Dependent Behaviour of Accretion Disks with Stochastic Perturbations
• Shock corrugation to the rescue of the internal shock model in microquasars: The single-scale MHD view