MG13 - Talk detail |
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Participant |
McClintock, Jeffrey | |||||||
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Institution |
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics - 60 Garden Street - Cambridge - Cambridge, Massachussetts 02138 - USA | |||||||
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SO1 |
Accepted |
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Talk |
Oral abstract |
Title |
Measuring the Spins of Black Holes and Applying the Results | |||||
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Abstract |
We have measured the spins of ten stellar-mass black holes, which are located in X-ray binary systems. We measure spin by fitting the thermal continuum spectrum of a black hole of known mass to the thin-disk model of Novikov and Thorne, thereby determining the radius of the inner edge of its accretion disk. Our measured values of spin range widely from near-zero values of a/M to a/M > 0.95, a result that provides important constraints on the evolution of the host binaries and on black-hole formation processes. For example, we find that the spins of at least some of these black holes are natal. Recently, we presented the first direct evidence that jets are powered by black hole spin energy. As a long-term goal, we aspire to test the no-hair theorem. |
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