%0 Journal Article
%T The mass of the black hole in GRS 1915+105: new constraints from IR spectroscopy
%A D. J. Hurley
%A P. J. Callanan
%A P. Elebert
%A M. T. Reynolds
%J Physics
%D 2013
%I arXiv
%R 10.1093/mnras/stt001
%X GRS 1915+105 has the largest mass function of any Galactic black hole system, although the error is relatively large. Here we present spectroscopic analysis of medium-resolution IR VLT archival data of GRS 1915+105 in the K-band. We find an updated ephemeris, and report on attempts to improve the mass function by a refinement of the radial velocity estimate. We show that the spectra are significantly affected by the presence of phase-dependent CO bandhead emission, possibly originating from the accretion disc: we discuss the impact this has on efforts to better constrain the black hole mass. We report on a possible way to measure the radial velocity utilising apparent H-band atomic absorption features and also discuss the general uncertainty of the system parameters of this well-studied object
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.0274v1