2004/02/01 by Marek A. Abramowicz, M. A. Abramowicz, Włodek Kluźniak +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Black hole (networking) #Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies #Galaxy #Intermediate-mass black hole #Oscillation (cell signaling) #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Solar mass #Spin-flip #Supermassive black hole #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/422810
published as The Astrophysical Journal, 609:L63-L65, 2004 July 10 · 3 p., 2 figs
arxiv created 2004/02/01 · openalex publication_date 2004/06/10 · arxiv updated 2012/08/13 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Recently, twin-peak quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) have been observed in a 3 : 2 ratio for three Galactic black hole microquasars with frequencies that have been shown to scale as 1/ M , as expected for general relativisitic motion near a black hole. It may be possible to extend this result to distinguish between the following two disparate models that have been proposed for the puzzling ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs): (1) an intermediate-mass black hole ( M ~ 10 3 M ☉ ) radiating very near the Eddington limit and (2) a conventional black hole ( M ~10 M ☉ ) accreting at a highly super-Eddington rate with its emission beamed along the rotation axis. We suggest that one could discriminate between these models by detecting the counterpart of a Galactic twin-peak QPO in a ULX: the expected frequency for the intermediate-mass black hole model is only about 1 Hz, whereas for the conventional black hole model the expected frequency would be the ~100 Hz value observed for the Galactic microquasars.