A NICER Look at Accreting Stellar Black Holes
Abstract
We present an overview of NICER’s far-reaching observational capabilities for accreting stellar-mass black holes. NICER’s high throughput, large collecting area, and sensitivity at low energies will afford an unprecedented view of black holes across all states. Black hole spectral-timing states are traversed when a black hole evolves through its outburst cycle, and each state is comprised of thermal disk, Compton, and reflection components. Crucially, NICER will produce our first direct look at oscillations in the thermal disk itself. Never before has the thermal peak of the accretion disk been easily accessible in the time domain. NICER spectra will impose strong constraints on the spectrum of thermal seed photons and the shape of the Compton component at low energies. In addition, NICER will produce reverberation maps of stellar-mass black holes in each of the thermal, Compton, and Fe-K (reflection) bands. Such data will be particularly critical for linking models of spectral reflection to Comptonization. At the same time, quasi-periodic X-ray oscillations from the thermal disk may yield precise signatures of a black-hole's spin and would be readily detectable with NICER. NICER data will demand a next generation of self-consistent models and push forward our understanding of the intricate interplay between Compton, thermal, and reflection components.
- Publication:
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AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #15
- Pub Date:
- April 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016HEAD...1520705S