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The importance of discovering a 3:2 twin-peak QPO in a ULX or how to solve the puzzle of intermediate mass black holes

Marek A. Abramowicz·Wlodek Kluzniak·Jeffrey E. McClintock·Ronald A. Remillard
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Abstract

Recently, twin-peak QPOs have been observed in a 3:2 ratio for three Galactic black-hole microquasars with frequencies that have been shown to scale as 1/M, as expected for general relativisitic motion near a black hole. It may be possible to extend this result to distinguish between the following two disparate models that have been proposed for the puzzling ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs): (1) an intermediate-mass black hole M ~1000 solar mass) radiating very near the Eddington limit and (2) a conventional black hole (M ~ 10 solar mass) accreting at a highly super-Eddington rate with its emission beamed along the rotation axis. We suggest that it may be possible to distinguish between these models by detecting the counterpart of a Galactic twin-peak QPO in a ULX: the expected frequency for the intermediate-mass black hole model is only about 1 Hz, whereas, for the conventional black hole model the expected frequency would be the ~100 Hz value observed for the Galactic microquasars.

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Marek A. Abramowicz, Wlodek Kluzniak, Jeffrey E. McClintock, Ronald A. Remillard. 2004-02-01. The importance of discovering a 3:2 twin-peak QPO in a ULX or how to solve the puzzle of intermediate mass black holes. https://doi.org/10.1086/422810

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