Affiliation:
1. Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology , 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8551 , Japan
2. Department of Physics, Ehime University , 2-5 Bunkyocho, Matsuyama, Ehime 790-8577 , Japan
3. RIKEN , 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198 , Japan
Abstract
Abstract
The X-ray spectral state transitions of Galactic black hole transients (GBHTs) are often linked to the changes in the mass accretion rate. A narrow distribution of transition luminosity in terms of the Eddington ratio has been found in previous studies of GBHTs based on RXTE data (Maccarone, 2003, A&A, 409, 697; Vahdat Motlagh et al., 2019, MNRAS, 485, 2744) and this Eddington ratio at the transition is often used in recent studies with instruments such as Swift/XRT and NICER/XTI, covering soft energies below 1 to 10 keV. However, the X-ray states characterized by spectral parameters may have different definitions depending on the energy ranges adopted in the spectral analysis, leaving the question of whether the distribution of transition luminosity obtained with RXTE remains the same when we use the instruments covering softer energy bands. In this work, we investigated the X-ray state evolutions and the variations of luminosities of eight outbursts of seven GBHTs. We found that the bolometric luminosity of the power-law component was tightly constrained to $\sim\! 1.3\%$ Eddington luminosity at index transition when the photon index starts to decrease towards the hard state, which is consistent with the previous RXTE results (Vahdat Motlagh et al. 2019, MNRAS, 485, 2744; Kalemci et al. 2013, ApJ, 779, 95). Moreover, the tightest clustering was found to be the power-law luminosity right after the start of disk recession, with a mean logarithmic Eddington ratio of −1.84 ± 0.28. In addition, our results suggest that the disk recession starts after the bolometric disk luminosity drops below 1% Eddington luminosity.
Funder
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Subject
Space and Planetary Science,Astronomy and Astrophysics