Quiescent black hole X-ray binaries as multi-messenger sources

Abstract

Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) are of unknown origin, even though they have traditionally been connected to supernovae due to energetic arguments. In the last decades, Galactic black holes in X-ray binaries (BHXBs) have been proposed as candidate sources of CRs revising the CR paradigm. BHXBs launch two relativistic jets during outbursts, but recent observations suggest that such jets may be launched even during quiescence. A0620-00 is such a well-studied object that shows hints of jet emission. In this work, we study the simultaneous radio-to-X-ray spectrum detected from this source while in quiescence to better constrain the jet dynamics. Given that the majority of BHXBs spend their lifetime in quiescence (qBHXBs), we use the jet dynamics of A0620-00 to study a population of 100000 such sources distributed throughout the Galactic disc, and a further 10000 located in the Boxy Bulge around the Galactic centre. While the contribution to the CR spectrum is suppressed, we find that the cumulative intrinsic emission of qBHXBs from both the Boxy Bulge and the Galactic disc adds to the diffuse emission that various facilities detect from radio to TeV gamma rays. We examine the contribution of qBHXBs to the Galactic diffuse emission and investigate the possibility of SKA, INTEGRAL and CTAO to detect individual sources in the future. Finally, we compare the predicted neutrino flux to the recently presented Galactic diffuse neutrino emission by IceCube.