CHARACTERIZING X-RAY AND RADIO EMISSION IN THE BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARY V404 CYGNI DURING QUIESCENCE

Journal Article · Wed Apr 20 04:00:00 EDT 2016 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/821/2/103· OSTI ID:22863002

Rana, Vikram; Walton, Dominic J.; Fuerst, Felix; Grefenstette, Brian W.; Harrison, Fiona A.; Madsen, Kristin K.; Tendulkar, Shriharsh ^[1]; Loh, Alan; Corbel, Stephane ^[2]; Tomsick, John A.; Boggs, Steven E.; Craig, William ^[3]; Chakrabarty, Deepto ^[4]; Barret, Didier ^[5]; Christensen, Finn E. ^[6]; Gandhi, Poshak ^[7]; Hailey, Charles ^[8]; Rahoui, Farid ^[9]; Stern, Daniel ^[10]; Zhang, William W. ^[11]

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1. Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
2. Laboratoire AIM (CEA/IRFU—CNRS/INSU—Université Paris Diderot), CEA DSM/IRFU/SAp, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
3. Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7450 (United States)
4. MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139 (United States)
5. Université de Toulouse, UPS-OMP, IRAP, Toulouse (France)
6. DTU Space, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby (Denmark)
7. Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE (United Kingdom)
8. Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 (United States)
9. European Southern Observatory, Karl Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, D-85748 Garching bei Munchen (Germany)
10. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
11. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)

We present results from multi-wavelength simultaneous X-ray and radio observations of the black hole X-ray binary V404 Cyg in quiescence. Our coverage with NuSTAR provides the very first opportunity to study the X-ray spectrum of V404 Cyg at energies above 10 keV. The unabsorbed broadband (0.3–30 keV) quiescent luminosity of the source is 8.9 × 10{sup 32} erg s{sup −1} for a distance of 2.4 kpc. The source shows clear variability on short timescales (an hour to a couple of hours) in the radio, soft X-ray, and hard X-ray bands in the form of multiple flares. The broadband X-ray spectra obtained from XMM-Newton and NuSTAR can be characterized with a power-law model having a photon index of Γ = 2.12 ± 0.07 (90% confidence errors); however, residuals at high energies indicate spectral curvature significant at a 3σ confidence level with the e-folding energy of the cutoff as 20{sub −7}{sup +20} keV. Such curvature can be explained using synchrotron emission from the base of a jet outflow. Radio observations using the VLA reveal that the spectral index evolves on very fast timescales (as short as 10 minutes), switching between optically thick and thin synchrotron emission, possibly due to instabilities in the compact jet or stochastic instabilities in the accretion rate. We explore different scenarios to explain this very fast variability.

• OSTI ID: 22863002
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 821; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ACCRETION DISKS
BINARY STARS
BLACK HOLES
EMISSION
HARD X RADIATION
INSTABILITY
KEV RANGE 10-100
LUMINOSITY
PHOTONS
SOFT X RADIATION
STOCHASTIC PROCESSES
WAVELENGTHS
X-RAY SPECTRA