On the origin of black hole spin in high-mass black hole binaries: Cygnus X-1
To date, there have been several detections of high-mass black hole binaries in both the Milky Way and other galaxies. For some of these, the spin parameter of the black hole has been estimated. As many of these systems are quite tight, a suggested origin of the spin is angular momentum imparted by the synchronous rotation of the black hole progenitor with its binary companion. Using Cygnus X-1, t