The Spin of The Black Hole in the X-ray Binary Nova Muscae 1991

Abstract

The bright soft X-ray transient Nova Muscae 1991 was intensively observed during its entire 8-month outburst using the Large Area Counter (LAC) onboard the Ginga satellite. Recently, we obtained accurate estimates of the mass of the black hole primary, the orbital inclination angle of the system, and the distance. Using these crucial input data and Ginga X-ray spectra, we have measured the spin of the black hole using the continuum-fitting method. For four X-ray spectra of extraordinary quality we have determined the dimensionless spin parameter of the black hole to be a/M = 0.63 (-0.19, +0.16) (1 sigma confidence level), a result that we confirm using eleven additional spectra of lower quality. Our spin estimate challenges two published results: It is somewhat higher than the value predicted by a proposed relationship between jet power and spin; and we find that the spin of the black hole is decidedly prograde, not retrograde as has been claimed.

Please refer to our companion paper for the system parameter estimate; 14 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables, ApJ submitted

References in corpus (8)

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• A Parallax Distance to the Microquasar GRS 1915+105 and a Revised Estimate of its Black Hole Mass
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• A Systematic View of Ten New Black Hole Spins
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• The Mass of the Black Hole in the X-ray Binary Nova Muscae 1991
• Estimating the black hole spin for the X-ray binary MAXI J1820+070
• Accretion in Strong Field Gravity with eXTP
• Extremely fast orbital decay of the black hole X-ray binary Nova Muscae 1991
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• Signatures of Einstein-Maxwell dilaton-axion gravity from the observed jet power and the radiative efficiency
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• Spin measurement of 4U 1543-47 with Insight-HXMT and NICER from its 2021 outburst: A test of accretion disk models at high luminosities
• Accreting Black Holes
• Getting More Out of Black Hole Superradiance: a Statistically Rigorous Approach to Ultralight Boson Constraints from Black Hole Spin Measurements
• Estimating the spin of the black hole candidate MAXI J1659-152 with the X-ray continuum-fitting method
• Using X-ray continuum-fitting to estimate the spin of MAXI J1305-704
• Observed jet power and radiative efficiency of black hole candidates in Kerr + PFDM model
• An apparent positive relation between spin and orbital angular momentum in X-ray binaries
• On the Theoretical Framework of Magnetized Outflows from Stellar-Mass Black Holes and Related Observations
• PATOKA: Simulating Electromagnetic Observables of Black Hole Accretion