2017ApJ...834...88M

The well-known black hole candidate (BHC) H 1743-322 exhibited temporal and spectral variabilities during several outbursts. The variation of the accretion rates and flow geometry that change on a daily basis during each of the outbursts can be very well understood using the recent implementation of the two-component advective flow solution of the viscous transonic flow equations as an additive table model in XSPEC. This has dramatically improved our understanding of accretion flow dynamics. Most interestingly, the solution allows us to treat the mass of the BHC as a free parameter and its mass could be estimated from spectral fits. In this paper, we fitted the data of two successive outbursts of H 1743-322 in 2010 and 2011 and studied the evolution of accretion flow parameters, such as two-component (Keplerian and sub-Keplerian) accretion rates, shock location (i.e., size of the Compton cloud), etc. We assume that the model normalization remains the same across the states in both these outbursts. We used this to estimate the mass of the black hole and found that it comes out in the range of 9.25–12.86 M_☉. For the sake of comparison, we also estimated mass using the Photon index versus Quasi Periodic Oscillation frequency correlation method, which turns out to be 11.65±0.67 M_☉ using GRO J1655-40 as a reference source. Combining these two estimates, the most probable mass of the compact object becomes 11.21_–1.96^+1.65 M_☉.