THE MASS OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1
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Orosz-2011-The mass of the blac.pdf
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Author(s)
Orosz, Jerome A.
McClintock, Jeffrey E.
Aufdenberg, Jason P.
Reid, Mark J.
Narayan, Ramesh
Gou, Lijun
Remillard, Ronald A
Date Issued
November 2011
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Orosz, Jerome A., Jeffrey E. McClintock, Jason P. Aufdenberg, Ronald A. Remillard, Mark J. Reid, Ramesh Narayan, and Lijun Gou. “THE MASS OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1.” The Astrophysical Journal 742, no. 2 (November 9, 2011): 84. © 2011 The American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Cygnus X-1 is a binary star system that is comprised of a black hole and a massive giant companion star in a tight orbit. Building on our accurate distance measurement reported in the preceding paper, we first determine the radius of the companion star, thereby constraining the scale of the binary system. To obtain a full dynamical model of the binary, we use an extensive collection of optical photometric and spectroscopic data taken from the literature. By using all of the available observational constraints, we show that the orbit is slightly eccentric (both the radial velocity and photometric data independently confirm this result) and that the companion star rotates roughly 1.4 times its pseudosynchronous value. We find a black hole mass of M = 14.8 ± 1.0 M [subscript ☉], a companion mass of M [subscript opt] = 19.2 ± 1.9 M [subscript ☉], and the angle of inclination of the orbital plane to our line of sight of i = 27.1 ± 0.8 deg.
MIT Department
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637x/742/2/84
