Hibernating black holes revealed by photometric mass functions

Abstract

We present a novel strategy to uncover the Galactic population of quiescent black holes (BHs). This is based on a new concept, the photometric mass function (PMF), which opens up the possibility of an efficient identification of dynamical BHs in large fields-of-view. This exploits the width of the disc Halpha emission line, combined with orbital period information. We here show that Halpha widths can be recovered using a combination of customized Halpha filters. By setting a width cut-off at 2200 km/s we are able to cleanly remove other Galactic populations of Halpha emitters, including ~99.9% of cataclysmic variables (CVs). Only short period (Porb<2.1 h) eclipsing CVs and AGNs will contaminate the sample but these can be easily flagged through photometric variability and, in the latter case, also mid-IR colours. We also describe the strategy of a deep (r=22) Galactic plane survey based on the concept of PMFs: HAWKs, the HAlpha-Width Kilo-deg Survey. We estimate that ~800 sqr deg are required to unveil ~50 new dynamical BHs, a three-fold improvement over the known population. For comparison, a century would be needed to produce an enlarged sample of 50 dynamical BHs from X-ray transients at the current discovery rate.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 17 pages, 13 figures, 5 Tables

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Black hole mass and spin measurements through the Relativistic Precession Model: XTE J1859+226
• Dynamical confirmation of a black hole in the X-ray transient Swift J1727.8-1613
• Radio Variability from a Quiescent Stellar Mass Black Hole Jet
• Mining for Candidates of Galactic Stellar-mass Black Hole Binaries with LAMOST
• Delimiting the black hole mass in the X-ray transient MAXI J1659-152 with H$\alpha$ spectroscopy
• A correlation between Ha trough depth and inclination in quiescent X-ray transients: evidence for a low-mass black hole in GRO J0422+32
• GS 2000+25: The Least Luminous Black Hole X-ray Binary
• The MAVERIC survey: A catalogue of radio sources in southern globular clusters from the Australia Telescope Compact Array
• Toward a Larger Sample of Radio Jets from Quiescent Black Hole X-ray Binaries
• On the recurrence times of neutron star X-ray binary transients and the nature of the Galactic Centre quiescent X-ray binaries
• Estimating the spin of the black hole candidate MAXI J1659-152 with the X-ray continuum-fitting method
• The flickering radio jet from the quiescent black hole X-ray binary A0620-00
• Constraining the nature of the accreting binary in CXOGBS J174623.5-310550
• The orbital period and inclination of the neutron star X-ray transient MAXI J1807+132
• An infrared FWHM-$K_2$ correlation to uncover highly reddened quiescent black holes
• A search for optical counterparts in quiescent black hole X-ray transients
• Astrometry of variable compact radio sources: A search for Galactic black hole X-ray binaries