Measuring black hole spin

Details Measuring black hole spin Measuring black hole spin

Jun 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009phdt.........4s&link_type=abstract

Proquest Dissertations And Theses 2009. Section 0084, Part 0606 202 pages; [Ph.D. dissertation].United States -- Massachusetts:

Physics

Black Hole Spin, Black Holes, Accretion Disks, General Relativity

Scientific paper

In this thesis we describe the work done to measure the spins of stellar-mablack holes found in X-ray emitting binary systems. The X-ray emission from these objects can be successfully modeled as nearly blackbody emission from accretion disks around the black holes. This is known as the continuum fitting method. We report spin results for GRO J1655-40, 4U1543-47 and GRS 1915+105 using the continuum fitting method applied in full general relativity with appropriate corrections for the hardening of the emitted spectrum by the accretion disk atmosphere. These are the first rigorous spin results using the continuum fitting method. The standard thin accretion disk models were developed in the early 1970s and are the basis of the more advanced spectral fitting models that are used currently. However, with recent developments in accretion disk physics, it has been suggested that the standard disk models need to be modified, particularly in the inner disk regions. At the same time, it has also been suggested that these correction are likely to be unimportant as long as the disk is geometrically thin, as is expected for the observations that are used for the continuum fitting method. We investigated these questions in two ways: first we solved the equations of hydrodynamics in pseudo-Newtonian gravity using numerical methods. Next, we simulated thin accretion disks using general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. Both approaches imply that the inclusion of more detailed physics does not change the results of the standard disk theory significantly and establish the validity of the earlier reported spin results.

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