New Evidence for Black Hole Event Horizons from Chandra
Abstract
Previously we claimed that Black Hole X-ray Novae (BHXN) in quiescence are much less luminous than equivalent Neutron Star X-ray Novae (NSXN). This claim was based on the quiescent detection of a single short period BHXN (A0620-00, P(orb)=7.8 hrs) and two longer period BHXN (GRO J1655-40, P(orb)=62.9 hrs; V404 Cyg, P(orb)=155.3 hrs), along with sensitive upper limits. We announce the detection of two more short period BHXN (GRO J0422+32, P(orb)=5.1 hrs; GS 2000+25, P(orb)=8.3 hrs), an upper limit for a third which is improved by two orders of magnitude (4U 1543-47, P(orb)=27.0 hrs) and a new, much lower quiescent measurement of GRO J1655-40. Taken together, these new Chandra measurements confirm that the quiescent X-ray luminosities of BHXN are significantly lower than those of NSXN. We argue that this provides strong evidence for the existence of event horizons in BHXN.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0012452,
title = {New Evidence for Black Hole Event Horizons from Chandra},
author = {Michael R. Garcia and Jeffrey E. McClintock and Ramesh Narayan and Paul Callanan and Stephen S. Murray},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0012452},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Submitted to ApJ Letters, 4 pages, 2 figures