Black Hole Binaries: The Journey from Astrophysics to Physics

This paper is based on a talk presented at the 208th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in the session on Short-Period Binary Stars. The talk (and this paper in turn) are based on a parent paper, which is a comprehensive review by Remillard and McClintock (2006; hereafter RM06) on the X–ray properties of binary stars that contain a stellar black-hole primary. We refer to these systems as black hole binaries. In this present paper, which follows closely the content of the talk, we give sketches of some of the main topics covered in RM06. For a detailed account of the topics discussed herein and a full list of references (which are provided only sketchily below), see RM06 and also a second review paper by McClintock & Remillard (2006; hereafter MR06). There is one subject that is treated in more detail here than in the two review papers just cited, namely, the measurement of black hole spin; on this topic, see McClintock et al. (2006) for further details and references.

This paper is organized as follows. In the following section we describe and catalog the 21 black hole binaries. In §§3-5, we present a brief review of spectral and timing observations of these binaries, focusing on the three X-ray states of accretion defined by MR06 and RM06. In §6, we sketch a scenario for the potential impact of timing/spectral studies of accreting black holes on physics. In §§7-8, we discuss a current frontier topic, namely, the measurement of black hole spin.