Truss, M. R. and Done, C. (2006) 'The decline and fall of GRS 1915+105 : the end is nigh?', Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society : letters., 368 (1). L25-L29.
The Galactic microquasar GRS 1915+105 has been in a continuous state of outburst since 1992, over 20 times longer than any other black hole X-ray transient. Assuming that the outburst is powered via accretion of an irradiated gaseous disc, we calculate how the predicted outburst duration varies according to the efficiency of the self-irradiation mechanism. At least one current model leads to the conclusion that the end of the outburst is imminent. The timing of the decline of GRS 1915+105, whenever it arrives, will be an excellent discriminator of the self-irradiation mechanism in X-ray transients, allowing us to infer the fraction of the disc that is heated by the incident X-rays and the magnitude of the mass loss rate in the form of a wind.
|Keywords:||Accretion, Accretion discs, Binaries, Stars.|
|Full text:||PDF - Other (140Kb)|
|Publisher Web site:||http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-3933.2006.00149.x|
|Publisher statement:||The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com|
|Record Created:||02 May 2008|
|Last Modified:||23 Jul 2014 21:58|
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