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Subsecond periodic radio oscillations in a microquasar

Nature volume 621, pages 271–275 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Powerful relativistic jets are one of the ubiquitous features of accreting black holes in all scales1,2,3. GRS 1915 + 105 is a well-known fast-spinning black-hole X-ray binary4 with a relativistic jet, termed a ‘microquasar’, as indicated by its superluminal motion of radio emission5,6. It has exhibited persistent X-ray activity over the last 30 years, with quasiperiodic oscillations of approximately 1–10 Hz (refs. 7,8,9) and 34 and 67 Hz in the X-ray band10. These oscillations probably originate in the inner accretion disk, but other origins have been considered11. Radio observations found variable light curves with quasiperiodic flares or oscillations with periods of approximately 20–50 min (refs. 12,13,14). Here we report two instances of approximately 5-Hz transient periodic oscillation features from the source detected in the 1.05- to 1.45-GHz radio band that occurred in January 2021 and June 2022. Circular polarization was also observed during the oscillation phase.

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Fig. 1: Light curves during the QPO phase in 2021.
Fig. 2: Evolution of the polarization parameters.
Fig. 3: Fast variations of the QPO.
Fig. 4: The power spectra of radio light curves based on the FAST observational data.

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Data availability

All relevant data for the GRS 1915 + 105 observations are available from the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope archive (http://fast.bao.ac.cn) one year after data taking following the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope data policy. Owing to the large data volume for these observations, interested users are encouraged to contact the corresponding author to arrange the data transfer. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Science Data Bank at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.08478.

Code availability

Code is available at PSRCHIVE (http://psrchive.sourceforge.net), DSPSR (http://dspsr.sourceforge.net) and PRESTO (https://github.com/scottransom/presto).

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFA0718500 and 2021YFA0718503), the NSFC (12133007, U1838103, U2031117, 12233002 and U2031205), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2021055), the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (YSBR-006) and the Cultivation Project for FAST Scientific Payoff and Research Achievement of CAMS-CAS.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Pengfu Tian, Ping Zhang, Wei Wang, Pei Wang

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astronomy, School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Pengfu Tian, Ping Zhang, Wei Wang, Zigao Dai, Jiashi Chen, Zonghong Zhu, Xiao Chen & Na Sai

  2. WHU-NAOC Joint Center for Astronomy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Pengfu Tian, Ping Zhang, Wei Wang, Jifeng Liu, Jiashi Chen, Xiao Chen & Na Sai

  3. National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Pei Wang, Jifeng Liu, Peng Jiang, Zheng Zheng, Di Li, Zhichen Pan & Hengqian Gan

  4. Institute for Frontiers in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Pei Wang

  5. School of Physics and Astronomy, Yunan University, Kunming, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaohui Sun

  6. Nevada Center for Astrophysics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Bing Zhang

  7. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Bing Zhang

  8. School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, People’s Republic of China

    Zigao Dai

  9. Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

    Feng Yuan

  10. Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Shuangnan Zhang

  11. Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

    Qingzhong Liu & Xuefeng Wu

  12. Guizhou Radio Astronomy Observatory, Guizhou University, Guiyang, People’s Republic of China

    Peng Jiang, Zhichen Pan & Hengqian Gan

  13. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Di Li

  14. Zhijiang Lab, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

    Di Li

  15. Henan Academy of Sciences, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Zonghong Zhu

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Contributions

W.W., as the principal investigator of the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope observations, led the data analysis and wrote the paper. P.T. and P.Z. did the data analysis. P.W., X.S., J.L. and Z. Zheng provided the help of the radio data analysis and software. W.W., B.Z., Z.D., F.Y., S.Z., Q.L. and X.W. constructed the scientific interpretation of the data and B.Z. contributed to the writing of the paper. P.W., P.J., D.L., Z. Zhu, Z.P. and H.G. aided with the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope observations. J.C., X.C. and N.S. provided the X-ray data. All authors have reviewed the results and manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wei Wang or Bing Zhang.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Stability of FAST performance.

The rms of the flux when the feed source is pointing to the background sky during our FAST observations.

Extended Data Fig. 2 A demonstration of RFI-mitigation experiment using the two-dimensional wavelet algorithm.

a, signal intensity as a function of frequency and time (waterfall) plot of the raw data of GRS 1915+105 between MJD 59239.09766 - 59239.09997 (bottom subplot) and frequency-averaged light curve (upper subplot). b, the red dots at the waterfall plot represent the masked RFI contaminated data by using the two-dimensional wavelet algorithm and then fill these masked data by the median values. c, comparison of frequency bandpass for the raw data and RFI removal result. d, comparison of histogram for raw data (white) and RFI removed data (blue, the red line is the gaussian fitting with the value of Chi-square is less than 5%).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Example of QPO signals and RFI removing simulations.

Upper panels show frequency-averaged light curves, subplots a/b/c are the raw data of sky background monitoring, simulated injection of 5-Hz and 10-Hz QPOs in the broad bands, and the light curve after removing all RFIs, respectively. Bottom panels show the corresponding Fourier power spectra in logarithmic and linear coordinates. Subplot c demonstrates the apparent increase in the significance of the detected QPO signals, i.e. from 4.2 σ to 12.5 σ for 5 Hz; from 1 σ to 3.4 σ for 10 Hz, compared with that in Subplot b. The simulations demonstrate that our RFI removing processes can efficiently reduce the narrow-band RFIs and keep the broad band astrophysical signals.

Extended Data Fig. 4 The 19-beam receiver performance.

Left panel: an absorber is used to cover the receiver feed opening during noise tests. Right panel: no-detection of 5-Hz or 10-Hz apparent peaks from FAST receiver itself on two of frequency-averaged light-curve time segments.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Light curve and dynamic power spectrum with less channels.

Lightcurve, spectral index evolution and dynamic PDS of the radio flux which is calibrated with directly removing RFI peaks from the channels 1400 to 2380. There are 2700 channels left after channel cutting and RFI removing. QPO signals at ~ 5 Hz are fainter compared to the case with about 3400 channels. The Epochs A, B and C have the same definition in Fig. 1, with the time record starting from January 25 2021 01:35:00 (UTC). The index α varies from − 0.6 to − 0.3 during the Epochs.

Extended Data Fig. 6 The DM value of QPO signals.

Amplitude (A) and full width at half maximum (σ) of the fitting Lorentzians for the folded curves evolve with DM. The peak of A/σ is located at DM ~ 255 ± 25pccm−3, which is fitted via a Gaussian function (green dashed line), would indicate the possible dispersion measure of GRS 1915+105.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Light curves and dynamical power spectrum during the QPO phase in 2022.

The light curves of total intensity flux density, LP, CP, PA, spectral index α and dynamic PDS with FAST observations from 2022-06-16:17:42:40 to 2021-06-16:17:47:30 (UTC). The transient QPO at ~ 5 Hz lasting about 80 seconds was detected. During the event, the radio flux was steady at a level around 350 mJy; LP was around 6.5% and increased slightly during the observations; CP was measured at ~ − 1.3%, and the PA was around 96∘. The spectral index α also evolved from − 0.08 to − 0.01. All error bars are given at the 1σ level.

Extended Data Fig. 8 The distributions for three time scales observed in Epoch B.

The duration distribution of the 5-Hz QPOs (top), separate interval distribution for two neighbour 5-Hz QPOs (middle), and duration distribution of the 10-Hz QPOs (bottom), and the red lines are the best fitting curves with the log-normal distribution.

Extended Data Fig. 9 X-ray monitoring during the radio QPOs.

Top: The X-ray light curves of GRS 1915+105 from 2016 - 2023 based on the SWIFT and MAXI long-term monitor observations. Bottom: The zoom-in version of the light curves around January 25 2021 and June 16 2022. The vertical dashed lines show the time of our FAST observations.

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Tian, P., Zhang, P., Wang, W. et al. Subsecond periodic radio oscillations in a microquasar. Nature 621, 271–275 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06336-6

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