The Soft State of the Black Hole Transient Source MAXI J1820+070: Emission from the Edge of the Plunge Region?
Name
2002.09691.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.15 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
dd304abae26e6af8b018dc6305ce8d1b
Author(s)
Fabian, AC
Buisson, DJ
Kosec, P
Reynolds, CS
Wilkins, DR
Tomsick, JA
Walton, DJ
Gandhi, P
Altamirano, D
Arzoumanian, Z
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The Galactic black hole X-ray binary MAXI J1820+070 had a bright outburst in 2018 when it became the second brightest X-ray source in the sky. It was too bright for X-ray CCD instruments such as XMM–Newton and Chandra, but was well observed by photon-counting instruments such as Neutron star Inner Composition Explorer (NICER) and Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array(NuSTAR). We report here on the discovery of an excess-emission component during the soft state. It is best modelled with a blackbody spectrum in addition to the regular disc emission, modelled as either diskbb or kerrbb. Its temperature varies from about 0.9 to 1.1 keV, which is about 30–80 per cent higher than the inner disc temperature of diskbb. Its flux varies between 4 and 12 per cent of the disc flux. Simulations of magnetized accretion discs have predicted the possibility of excess emission associated with a non-zero torque at the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) about the black hole, which, from other NuSTAR studies, lies at about 5 gravitational radii or about 60 km (for a black hole, mass is $8\, {\rm M}_{\odot }$). In this case, the emitting region at the ISCO has a width varying between 1.3 and 4.6 km and would encompass the start of the plunge region where matter begins to fall freely into the black hole.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/MNRAS/STAA564
