Ultraluminous Supersoft X-ray sources as super-critical accretion onto stellar black holes

Authors
Prof.
Jifeng Liu
Date and time
2 Sep 2016 - 13:00 Europe/London
Address

Aula

Talk language
English
Slides language
English
Description

While ultraluminous supersoft X-ray sources (ULSs) bear features for intermediate mass black holes or very massive white dwarfs possibly close to Chandrasekhar mass limit, our recent discovery of processing relativistic baryonic jets from a prototype ULS in M81 demonstrate that they are not IMBHs or WDs, but black holes accreting at super-Eddington rates. This discovery strengthens the recent ideas that ULXs are stellar black holes with supercritical accretion, as demonstrated in the case of M101 ULX-1, and provides a vivid manifestation of what happens when a black hole devours too much, that is, it will generate thick disk winds and fire out sub-relativistic baryonic jets along the funnel as predicted by recent numerical simulations.