Extracting common signal components from the X-ray and optical light curves of GX 339-4: new view for anti-correlation

TL;DR

This study decomposes the complex correlated and anti-correlated signals in GX 339-4's light curves into common components, revealing that combined signals can explain observed anti-correlations and providing insights into emission mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract and analyze common signal components from simultaneous X-ray and optical light curves, clarifying the origin of correlations and anti-correlations in black hole binaries.

Findings

Confirmed the presence of two main correlated components with different delays.

Reconstructed signals suggest anti-correlations arise from combined positive correlations.

Indicated potential physical origins for optical and X-ray lagged signals.

Abstract

Simultaneous X-ray and optical observations of black hole X-ray binaries have shown that the light curves contain multiple correlated and anti-correlated variation components when the objects are in the hard state. In the case of the black hole X-ray binary, GX 339-4, the cross correlation function (CCF) of the light curves suggests a positive correlation with an optical lag of 0.15 s and anti-correlations with an optical lag of 1 s and X-ray lag of 4 s. This indicates the two light curves have some common signal components with different delays. In this study, we extracted and reconstructed those signal components from the data for GX 339-4. The results confirmed that correlation and anti-correlation with the optical lag are two common components. However, we found that the reconstructed light curve for the anti-correlated component indicates a positively correlated variation with an X-ray lag of ~ +1 s. In addition, the CCF for this signal component shows anti-correlations not only with the optical lag, but also with the X-ray lag, which is consistent with the CCF for the data. Therefore, our results suggest that the combination of the two positively correlated components, that is, the X-ray preceding signal with the 0.15-s optical lag and the optical preceding signal with the 1-s X-ray lag, can make the observed CCF without anti-correlated signals. The optical preceding signal may be caused by synchrotron emission in a magnetically dominated accretion flow or in a jet, while further study is required to understand the mechanism of the X-ray time lag.