6th FERO meeting

ASTRONOMICAL INSTITUTE
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, PRAGUE
Boční II 1401, 141 00 Praha 4
Czech Republic

30th – 31st of August 2012



Euro in Czech Crowns: 1€ = Kč
Metro-Tram scheme
Map of centre (more detailed)
    Participants

August



Gabriele Ponti

Ubiquitous equatorial accretion disc winds in black hole soft states


The advent of high resolution X-ray spectroscopy has allowed to probe the presence and physical conditions of highly ionised winds in Black Hole Binaries (BHB). In particular, FeK winds are generally associated with large outflow velocities (10^3 km/s) and large mass loads, indicating mass outflow rates of the order or higher than the mass inflow rate. These winds are, thus, key components in our understanding of the accretion onto BH mechanism. We analysed all the HETG Chandra, XMM-Newton and Suzaku observations of every Low Mass X-ray Binary (LMXB) to investigate these winds. In GRS1915+105 we observe both a strong correlation between the presence of the wind and the source state and an anti-correlation with the jet (the FeK wind being detected in 12 out of 12 observations in the soft state and absent in 12 out of 13 observations in the hard state). We show that all the dipping LMXB share this same behaviour, while the non-dipping LMXB never show any sign of FeK winds, regardless of the state. We interpret this as a strong evidence for flattened disc winds as a ubiquitous component of the jet-free soft states.