Bibcode
Garcia, M.; McClintock, J.; Narayan, R.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, 189th AAS Meeting, #76.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1372
Advertised on:
12
1996
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Recently, models for Advection Dominated Accretion Flow (ADAF) have been
shown to explain many of the quiescent properties of the X-ray and
optical emission from black hole soft X-ray transients (BH SXT)
(Narayan, McClintock and Yi 1996 ApJ 457, 821; Narayan, Barret and
McClintock 1996, submitted to ApJ). One novel feature of the ADAF model
is that the black hole event horizon plays a key role in the energetics
of the flow, in that it absorbs the majority of the energy in the
accretion flow. An ADAF flow around a neutron star (NS) SXT instead will
release all of its accretion energy upon impacting on the NS surface (Yi
et al 1996, submitted to A&A). Therefore one expects that NS SXT
will be substantially more luminous than BH SXT in quiescence. We
present results on 5 NS SXT and 4 BH SXT that appear to bear out this
expectation. In the context of the ADAF model, the larger dynamic range
in BH SXT outburst/quiescent luminosities can be seen as evidence for
the existence of an event horizon in these BH.