Related papers: DIM light on Black Hole X-ray Transients

The radiation-driven warping instability discovered by Pringle holds considerable promise as the mechanism responsible for producing warped, precessing accretion disks in X-ray binaries. This instability is an inherently global mode of the…

The continuum-fitting method is one of the two most advanced methods of determining the black hole spin in accreting X-ray binary systems. There are, however, still some unresolved issues with the underlying disk models. One of them…

This article provides a summary of XMM-Newton highlights on stellar tidal disruption events. First found with ROSAT, ongoing and upcoming sky surveys will detect these events in the 1000s. In X- rays, tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide…

A perfect irrotational fluid with the equation of state of dust, Irrotational Dark Matter (IDM), is incapable of virializing and instead forms a cosmoskeleton of filaments with supermassive black holes at the joints. This stark difference…

This is a general review on the observations and physics of black hole X-ray binaries and microquasars, with the emphasize on recent developments in the high energy regime. The focus is put on understanding the accretion flows and measuring…

We present an extension of the King et al. (2004) model for the flickering of black hole accretion discs by taking proper account for the thermal properties of the disc. First we develop a one-dimensional, vertically averaged, one-zone…

We have recently put forward a 'unified' semi-empirical model for the coupling between accretion and jet production in galactic black hole X-ray binaries (published in MNRAS, 2004). In this paper we summarise this model and briefly discuss…

The vast majority of massive binary systems in the universe is evidently unsuited to produce merging binary black holes. However, several narrow evolutionary paths of isolated massive binaries towards this goal have recently been…

We outline a framework for understanding the X-ray spectra of high mass accretion rate stellar black holes based on X-ray data from RXTE and ASCA. Three spectral regimes can be separated out by the behaviour of the observed disk luminosity…

We use the Novikov-Thorne thin disk model to fit the thermal continuum X-ray spectra of black hole X-ray binaries, and thereby extract the dimensionless spin parameter a* = a/M of the black hole as a parameter of the fit. We summarize the…

Flux variability is a remarkable property of black hole (BH) accreting systems, and a powerful tool to investigate the multi-scale structure of the accretion flow. The X-ray band is where some of the most rapid variations occur, pointing to…

The mechanism of X-ray outbursts in Be X-ray binaries remains a mystery, and understanding their circumstellar disks is crucial for a solution of the mass-transfer problem. In particular, it is important to identify the Be star activities…

(Abridged) We present a comprehensive study of the relation between radio and X-ray emission in neutron star X-ray binaries, use this to infer the general properties of the disc-jet coupling in such systems, and compare the results…

Observations of accreting systems often show significant variability (10-20 percent of accretion luminosity) on timescales much longer than expected for the disc regions releasing most of the luminosity. We propose an explicit physical…

We discuss masses of stellar black holes found in binary systems and errors in their determination. The observed mass distribution has a broad shape within the range $4-16 M_\odot$ without visible concentration to some preferred value. On…

We test the truncated disc models using multiwavelength (optical/UV/X-ray) data from the 2005 hard state outburst of the black hole SWIFT J1753.5-0127. This system is both fairly bright and has fairly low interstellar absorption, so gives…

Stellar-mass black holes (BHs) are mostly found in X-ray transients, a subclass of X-ray binaries that exhibit violent outbursts. None of the 50 Galactic BHs known show eclipses, which is surprising for a random distribution of…

A large number of Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources in external galaxies is now known, but the discussion about their nature is still unsettled: intermediate-mass black holes or stellar-mass black holes accreting above the Eddington limit? A…

We present a high-density relativistic reflection analysis of 21 spectra of six black hole X-ray binaries in the hard state with data from \textit{NuSTAR} and \textit{Swift}. We find that 76\% of the observations in our sample require a…

Swift J1727.8$-$1613 is a newly discovered transient low-mass X-ray binary harbouring a stellar-mass ($\sim 10M_\odot$) black hole. We present state-resolved VLT/X-Shooter optical spectroscopy of its 2023 outburst, sampling the luminous…