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Reverberation Reveals the Truncated Disc in the Hard State of GX 339-4

Mahmoud, Ra’ad D.; Done, Chris; De Marco, Barbara

Reverberation Reveals the Truncated Disc in the Hard State of GX 339-4 Thumbnail


Authors

Ra’ad D. Mahmoud

Barbara De Marco



Abstract

The nature and geometry of the hard state in black hole binaries is controversial. The broadband continuum spectrum and fast variability properties can be explained in a model where the inner disc evaporates into a geometrically thick, hot flow. However these models are challenged by the persistent detection of an extremely broad iron line, which requires that the disc extends down to the last stable orbit of a high spin black hole. This line width can be considerably reduced if the Comptonisation continuum is multi-component rather than single temperature, but such models are highly degenerate. Here we show a specific model of a radially stratified continuum coupled to a model of propagating fluctuations, fit to some of the best hard state data from GX 339-4. This full spectral-timing model can fit the time averaged spectrum, the power spectra in different energy bands, and the frequency dependent lags between these bands. For the first time we also include disc reverberation and show that this same spectral-timing successfully predicts the lag-energy spectra on all timescales. This gives a more robust method to determine the inner radius of the disc, which is of order 20 Rg, i.e. significantly truncated. This opens up the way to use the fast variability spectral-timing data to trace the source geometry of black hole binaries in all states.

Citation

Mahmoud, R. D., Done, C., & De Marco, B. (2019). Reverberation Reveals the Truncated Disc in the Hard State of GX 339-4. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 486(2), 2137-2152. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz933

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 29, 2019
Online Publication Date Apr 8, 2019
Publication Date Jun 30, 2019
Deposit Date Apr 9, 2019
Publicly Available Date Apr 9, 2019
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 486
Issue 2
Pages 2137-2152
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz933

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Copyright Statement
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.






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