Measuring black hole spins through X-ray reflection spectroscopy and the relativistic precession model: the case of XTE J1859+226

Abstract

ABSTRACT The development of techniques to measure accurately black hole spins is crucial to study the physics and astrophysics of these objects. X-ray reflection spectroscopy is currently the most popular method to estimate the spins of accreting black holes; so far it has provided a spin measurement of about 40 stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries and 40 supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. The relativistic precession model (RPM) is another method to measure the spins of stellar-mass black holes: it requires the measurement of the frequencies of three simultaneous quasi-periodic oscillations and can potentially provide precise estimates of the black hole mass and spin. However, the two methods do not seem to provide consistent results when applied to the same sources, which questions the reliability and accuracy of these measurements. Recently, the RPM has been applied to infer the spin of the black hole in XTE J1859+226. The authors found a* = 0.149 ± 0.005 (68  per cent CL). There are no other spin measurements of this source. We looked for archived RXTE observations of XTE J1859+226 with blurred reflection features and found 23 spectra suitable for measuring the spin. We employed two different models with relxill and relxillD and obtained a higher spin value from all these fits. From simultaneous fitting of seven spectra of higher quality, we found $a_* = 0.986^{+0.001}_{-0.004}$ and a* = 0.987 ± 0.003 (90  per cent CL, statistical) with relxill and relxillD, respectively. Our results confirm the discrepancy between the spin measurements inferred from the two techniques.