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arXiv, 2022

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2206.09972

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science, 6620(378), p. 650-654, 2022

DOI: 10.1126/science.add5399

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Polarized x-rays constrain the disk-jet geometry in the black hole x-ray binary Cygnus X-1

Journal article published in 2022 by Henric Krawczynski ORCID, Fabio Muleri ORCID, Michal Dovčiak ORCID, Alexandra Veledina ORCID, Nicole Rodriguez Cavero ORCID, Jiri Svoboda ORCID, Adam Ingram ORCID, Giorgio Matt ORCID, Javier A. Garcia ORCID, Vladislav Loktev, Michela Negro ORCID, Juri Poutanen ORCID, Takao Kitaguchi, Jakub Podgorný ORCID, John Rankin ORCID and other authors.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

A black hole x-ray binary (XRB) system forms when gas is stripped from a normal star and accretes onto a black hole, which heats the gas sufficiently to emit x-rays. We report a polarimetric observation of the XRB Cygnus X-1 using the Imaging x-ray Polarimetry Explorer. The electric field position angle aligns with the outflowing jet, indicating that the jet is launched from the inner x-ray emitting region. The polarization degree is (4.01+-0.20)% at 2 to 8 kiloelectronvolts, implying that the accretion disk is viewed closer to edge-on than the binary orbit. The observations reveal that hot x-ray emitting plasma is spatially extended in a plane perpendicular to the jet axis, not parallel to the jet.