Friday, January 4, 2013

1301.0274 (D. J. Hurley et al.)

The mass of the black hole in GRS 1915+105: new constraints from IR spectroscopy    [PDF]

D. J. Hurley, P. J. Callanan, P. Elebert, M. T. Reynolds
GRS 1915+105 has the largest mass function of any Galactic black hole system, although the error is relatively large. Here we present spectroscopic analysis of medium-resolution IR VLT archival data of GRS 1915+105 in the K-band. We find an updated ephemeris, and report on attempts to improve the mass function by a refinement of the radial velocity estimate. We show that the spectra are significantly affected by the presence of phase-dependent CO bandhead emission, possibly originating from the accretion disc: we discuss the impact this has on efforts to better constrain the black hole mass. We report on a possible way to measure the radial velocity utilising apparent H-band atomic absorption features and also discuss the general uncertainty of the system parameters of this well-studied object
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.0274

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