The majority of the confirmed black hole binary systems in the Milky Way are soft X-ray transients, which are short-period binaries first identified during X-ray outbursts. It is usually challenging to measure the mass of the black hole for these systems as the optical emission from the companion is often contaminated by the contribution of accretion disk. In this talk, I will discuss how to reliably measure the black hole mass in soft X-ray transients using simultaneous spectroscopy and photometry, taking Nova Muscae 1991 as a case study.

报告人简介: 
Prof. Jianfeng Wu earned his bachelor (2003) and master (2006) degrees from Tsinghua University. Then he moved to The Pennsylvania State University in USA, obtaining his PhD degree in 2012. He did postdoctoral research afterward at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and University of Michigan. In 2017 he joined the Department of Astronomy in Xiamen University. He is now holding a "Minjiang Scholar" Distinguished Professorship. His research is focused on the observational properties of black holes across the mass scale, studying both physical properties of black holes (e.g., measurement of mass) and their cosmological evolution (e.g., high-redshift quasars). He is specially interested in multiwavelength data analysis and large scale surveys.