Constraint on the Spin of the Black Hole in GX 339-4 from X-ray Continuum

• Main Authors: Yi-Hao Su, 蘇羿豪
• Other Authors: Yi Chou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/59021460994432995624

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 天文研究所 === 99 === We present our analysis result for constraining the spin of the stellar-mass black hole (BH) in the X-ray binary GX 339-4 by fitting its X-ray continuum spectra. Reis et al. (2008) determined its spin to be a*=0.935±0.01 by modeling the profile of Fe K α line. However, Kolehmainen & Done (2010) concluded that its spin is no more than 0.9 from X-ray continuum fitting method. To resolve these contradictive results and estimate its spin, we first adopted two fully relativistic, thin accretion disk models combined with a simple comptonization model to fit X-ray continuum spectra of GX 339-4 observed by Proportional Counter Array (PCA) on Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer(RXTE) during its 2002-2010 outbursts. We set up constraints suggested by McClintock et al. (2006) and Steiner et al. (2009a & 2010) to select the data suitable for thin accretion disk model to further analyze. We then used the most recently developed modified model (McClintock et al. 2006) to further constrain the black hole spin. Our result indicates that the BH spin is no less than a*=0.94, which is likely favorable to the result from Reis et al. (2008).