Observational Constraints on Black Hole Spin

TL;DR

This review discusses current methods for measuring black hole spins across different systems, highlights recent observational findings, and emphasizes the importance of spin in understanding black hole formation and energy processes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of electromagnetic and gravitational wave techniques for black hole spin measurement and summarizes recent observational results across various black hole populations.

Findings

Supermassive black holes are often rapidly spinning, with some slower spins at higher masses.

Stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries are generally rapidly spinning, indicating they were born that way.

Gravitational wave detections show most merging black holes are slowly spinning, with some exceptions.

Abstract

The spin of a black hole is an important quantity to study, providing a window into the processes by which a black hole was born and grew. Further, spin can be a potent energy source for powering relativistic jets and energetic particle acceleration. In this review, I describe the techniques currently used to detect and measure the spins of black holes. It is shown that: (1) Two well understood techniques, X-ray reflection spectroscopy and thermal continuum fitting, can be used to measure the spins of black holes that are accreting at moderate rates. There is a rich set of other electromagnetic techniques allowing us to extend spin measurements to lower accretion rates. (2) Many accreting supermassive black holes are found to be rapidly-spinning, although a population of more slowly spinning black holes emerges at masses above $M>3\times 10^7\,M_\odot$ as expected from recent structure formation models. (3) Many accreting stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binary systems are rapidly spinning and must have been born in this state. (4) The advent of gravitational wave astronomy has enabled the detection of spin effects in merging binary black holes. Most of the pre-merger black holes are found to be slowly spinning, a notable exception being an object that may itself be a merger product. (5) The stark difference in spins between the black hole X-ray binary and the binary black hole populations shows that there is a diversity of formation mechanisms. Given the array of new electromagnetic and gravitational wave capabilities currently being planned, the future of black hole spin studies is bright.