Probing Strong Gravity by Black Holes Across the Range of Masses - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

FP7 SPACE – call 5: SPA.2012.2.1-01 Exploitation of Science and Exploration Data

Proposal: 312789 - StrongGravity

Probing Strong Gravity by Black Holes Across the Range of Masses

Coordinator: Astronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences Czech Republic (AsU) – Michal Dovčiak Partners: CNRS and UNISTRA (France) UNIROMA3 (Italy) UCAM (United Kingdom) CSIC (Spain) UCO (Germany) CAMK (Poland)

Outline of the presentation:

• Scientific and technical quality
• Concept and objectives
• Progress beyond the state of the art
• S/T methodology and associated work plan
• Implementation
• Management structure and procedures
• Individual participants
• Consortium as a whole
• Resources to be committed
• Impacts

Concept and objectives – Black holes at different angular momenta

• Einstein's field equation

→ existence of Black Holes (BH)

• Astrophysical Black Holes

→ mass M → angular momentum (spin) a

• BHs according to mass

→ stellar-mass BHs → supermassive BHs, 106–109 Msol → intermediate mass BHs (ULX ?)

• Angular momentum per unit mass – spin a: between 0 and 1

→ event horizon between 1 and 2 → ISCO – Innermost Stable Circular Orbit between 1 and 9 → differences visible very close to the centre

• Why to measure the spin (and spin distribution among BHs)

→ information on supernovae and hypernovae explosions → growth history → accretion versus mergers

Concept and objectives – Black holes at different angular momenta

• Our goal:

→ determine in combined theoretical and observational effort the so far most accurate and robust census of the BH spin distribution in the local universe → develop new analytical tools (General Relativity, radiative transfer effects) → apply these new tools to observational data from archives

• f European space-based and ground-based observatories
• r obtained in new observational campaigns

Progress beyond the state of the art – AGN

• Active Galactic Nuclei

→ radio galaxies, Seyfert galaxies, Quasars, … Structure of AGN

Progress beyond the state of the art – AGN

• Innermost regions where X-rays are produced

sketch of the system spectral components → accretion disc (seed photons, reflection) → hot corona (primary X-ray source) → distant torus (narrow spectral line) → warm absorbers (ionized winds)

Progress beyond the state of the art – AGN

• Spin determination using

→ spin – ISCO relation → relativistically broadened iron Kα spectral line

• Difficulties

→ interpretation with complex absorption model partially covering the primary X-ray source → complexity of the system

Progress beyond the state of the art – Sgr A*

• The nearest supermassive Black Hole

→ in the centre of our own galaxy

• Mass ~ 4.4x106 Msol (from orbits of nearby stars)
• Very low luminosity

→ a probe to low accretion rate system with low radiation efficiency

• NIR and X-ray flares around 100 min. long with < 10 min. lag

(orbiting spot? ejected blob?)

• Importance of multi-wavelength observations
• Variability on time-scales of ISCO period
• NIR polarization data available

Advances beyond the state of the art – AGN

• On the theoretical side:

→ improvement in modeling of all spectral components → the primary component: special rel. Comptonization code → the refl. component: different ionization states, modeling

• f lags between primary and reflected emission

→ the iron line emission: realistic emissivity laws → the warm absorber: treating absorption and emission lines self-consistently → develop and use 3D polarization code for modeling the light curves and polarized emission of Sgr A*

• On the observational side:

→ explore the public archives and propose new observations with the current and near-future X-ray facilities → to solve the ambiguity between reflection and absorption model → determine more robustly the iron line profile and the spin → search for time lags between primary and refl. components

Progress beyond the state of the art – GBHs

• Stellar-mass BHs in X-ray binary systems

→ only in our own galaxy (exception: ULX) → Black Hole, donor star, accretion disc → different spectral states (low hard, high soft, very high,...) → mass scaling (connection to AGN) → spin determination:

• Thermal emission
• Iron line
• QPOs
• polarimetry

→ spin-jet relation

Advances beyond the state of the art – GBHs

• On the theoretical side:

→ improvement on present disc emission models → disc self-irradiation → advection processes → properties of the disc corona → refine QPO models → GR effects correctly accounted for in all of these models

• On the observational side:

→ explore the public archives and propose new observations with the current and near-future X-ray facilities → measure the spin with different methods

S/T methodology and associated work plan

30 40 97 23 12 18 57 26 47 43 40 64 28 38

S/T methodology and associated work plan

WP 1 WP 2 WP 3 WP 4 WP 5 WP 6 WP 7 WP 8 WP 9 WP 10 WP 11 WP 12 WP 13 WP 14

AsU

30 23 11 4 8 2 5 4 21 5 14 2 6 135

CNRS

9 14 2 5 3 3 3 16 14 1 70

UNI ROMA3

2 32 17 6 15 3 1 76

UCAM

15 8 24 10 1 58

CSIC

6 18 21 20 6 1 72

UCO

23 34 1 58

CAMK

7 32 23 2 13 16 1 94

TOTAL

30 40 97 23 43 40 64 28 38 47 26 57 18 12 563

S/T methodology and associated work plan Deliverables

• Management

→ minutes from project meetings → project website – internal and external → list of teams and published papers → reports

• Research

→ numerical codes → models in XSPEC → computed tables → separate or as table models in XSPEC → observation proposals, archive search, data reduction, analysis and modeling → presentations on conferences → scientific papers

• Public outreach

→ web pages for scientific community → web pages for general public → public lectures

Possible risks in the project → we believe that our proposal has very low risks → all tasks require expertise that is available within the consortium → the most important external factors are on the observational side: → we have to rely → on the efficient prosecution over the next years of the current X-ray facilities (XMM-Newton, whose operations are at the moment guaranteed till 2014 but with very good chances for further extensions) → on the success of programmed future X-ray missions like NuSTAR, ASTRO-H and GEMS (we note here that the rate of failure in the past was quite small) → we need the success of our proposals for observations with current and future facilities – in the past we have been quite successful in this respect