Strong disk winds traced throughout outbursts in black-hole X-ray binaries

Recurring outbursts associated with matter flowing onto compact stellar remnants (such as black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs) in close binary systems provide a way of constraining the poorly understood accretion process. The light curves of these outbursts are shaped by the efficiency of angular-momentum (and thus mass) transport in the accretion disks, which has traditionally been encoded in a viscosity parameter, a. Numerical simulations(1-3) of the magneto-rotational instability that is believed to be the physical mechanism behind this transport yield values of a of roughly 0.1-0.2, consistent with values determined from observations of accreting white dwarfs(4). Equivalent viscosity parameters have hitherto not been estimated for disks around neutron stars or black holes. Here we report the results of an analysis of archival X-ray light curves of 21 outbursts in black-hole X-ray binaries. By applying a Bayesian approach to a model of accretion, we determine corresponding values of a of around 0.2-1.0. These high values may be interpreted as an indication either of a very high intrinsic rate of angular-momentum transport in the disk, which could be sustained by the magneto-rotational instability only if a large-scale magnetic field threads the disk(5-7), or that mass is being lost from the disk through substantial outflows, which strongly shape the outburst in the black-hole X-ray binary. The lack of correlation between our estimates of a and the accretion state of the binaries implies that such outflows can remove a substantial fraction of the disk mass in all accretion states and therefore suggests that the outflows correspond to magnetically driven disk winds rather than thermally driven ones, which require specific radiative conditions(8).