Bibcode
Paredes, J. M.; Munar-Adrover, P.; Ribó, M.; Casares, J.; Moldón, J.; Iwasawa, K.; Marcote, B.; Migliari, S.; Paredes-Fortuny, X.
Referencia bibliográfica
The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 835, Issue 2, article id. L33, 6 pp. (2017).
Fecha de publicación:
2
2017
Número de citas
29
Número de citas referidas
26
Descripción
MWC 656 is the first known Be/black hole (BH) binary system. Be/BH
binaries are important in the context of binary system evolution and
sources of detectable gravitational waves because they are possible
precursors of coalescing neutron star/BH binaries. X-ray observations
conducted in 2013 revealed that MWC 656 is a quiescent high-mass X-ray
binary (HMXB), opening the possibility to explore X-ray/radio
correlations and the accretion/ejection coupling down to low
luminosities for BH HMXBs. Here we report on a deep joint Chandra/VLA
observation of MWC 656 (and contemporaneous optical data) conducted in
2015 July that has allowed us to unambiguously identify the X-ray
counterpart of the source. The X-ray spectrum can be fitted with a power
law with Γ ∼ 2, providing a flux of ≃4 ×
10‑15 erg cm‑2 s‑1 in
the 0.5–8 keV energy range and a luminosity of L X
≃ 3 × 1030 erg s‑1 at a 2.6 kpc
distance. For a 5 M⊙ BH this translates into ≃5
× 10‑9 L Edd. These results imply that
MWC 656 is about 7 times fainter in X-rays than it was two years before
and reaches the faintest X-ray luminosities ever detected in
stellar-mass BHs. The radio data provide a detection with a peak flux
density of 3.5 ± 1.1 μJy beam‑1. The obtained
X-ray/radio luminosities for this quiescent BH HMXB are fully compatible
with those of the X-ray/radio correlations derived from quiescent BH
low-mass X-ray binaries. These results show that the accretion/ejection
coupling in stellar-mass BHs is independent of the nature of the donor
star.
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