Measuring the black hole masses in accreting X-ray binaries by detecting the Doppler orbital motion of their accretion disk wind absorption lines

Abstract

So far essentially all black hole masses in X-ray binaries have been obtained by observing the companion star's velocity and light curves as functions of the orbital phase. However a major uncertainty is the estimate of the orbital inclination angle of an X-ray binary. Here we suggest to measure the black hole mass in an X-ray binary by measuring directly the black hole's orbital motion, thus obtaining the companion to black hole mass ratio. In this method we assume that accretion disk wind moves with the black hole and thus the black hole's orbital motion can be obtained from the Doppler velocity of the absorption lines produced in the accretion disk wind. We validate this method by analyzing the Chandra/HETG observations of GRO J1655-40, in which the black hole orbital motion with line of sight velocity of 90.8 (+-11.3) km/s, inferred from the Doppler velocity of disk-wind absorption lines, is consistent with the prediction from its previously measured system parameters. We obtain the black hole mass of 5.41 (+0.98, -0.57) solar masses and system inclination of 72.0 (+7.8, -7.5) degrees in GRO J1655-40. Additional observations of this source covering more orbital phases can improve estimates on its system parameters substantially. We then apply the method to the black hole X-ray binary LMC X-3 observed with HST/COS near orbital phase 0.75. We find that the disk-wind absorption lines of CIV doublet were shifted to about 50 km/s, which yields a companion-to-black-hole mass ratio of 0.6 for an assumed disk wind velocity of -400 km/s. Additional observations covering other orbital phases (0.25 in particular) are crucial to ease this assumption and then to directly constrain the mass ratio. This method in principle can also be applied to any accreting compact objects with detectable accretion disk wind absorption line features.