Supercritically accreting stellar mass black holes as ultraluminous X‐ray sources

We derive the luminosity–temperature relation for the supercritically accreting black holes (BHs) and compare it to the data on ultraluminous X‐ray sources (ULXs). At super‐Eddington accretion rates, an outflow forms within the spherization radius. We construct the accretion disc model accounting for the advection and the outflow, and compute characteristic disc temperatures. The bolometric luminosity exceeds the Eddington luminosity L Edd by a logarithmic factor (where is the accretion rate in Eddington units) and the wind kinetic luminosity is close to L Edd . The apparent luminosity for the face‐on observer is 2–7 times higher because of geometrical beaming. Such an observer has a direct view of the inner hot accretion disc, which has a peak temperature T max of a few keV in stellar mass BHs. The emitted spectrum extends as a power law F E ∝ E −1 down to the temperature at the spherization radius . We associate T max with a few keV spectral components and T sp with the soft, 0.1–0.2 keV components observed in ULXs. An edge‐on observer sees only the soft emission from the extended envelope, with the photosphere radius exceeding the spherization radius by orders of magnitude. The dependence of the photosphere temperature on luminosity is consistent with that observed in the super‐Eddington accreting BHs SS 433 and V4641 Sgr. Strong outflows combined with the large intrinsic X‐ray luminosity of the central BH explain naturally the presence of the photoionized nebulae around ULXs. An excellent agreement between the model and the observational data strongly argues in favour of ULXs being supercritically accreting, stellar mass BHs similar to SS 433, but viewed close to the symmetric axis.