Discovery of high-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations in the black hole candidate IGR J17091-3624

We report the discovery of 8.5σ high-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations (HFQPOs) at 66 Hz in the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer data of the black hole candidate IGR J17091-3624, a system whose X-ray properties are very similar to those of microquasar GRS 1915+105. The centroid frequency of the strongest peak is ~66 Hz, its quality factor above five, and its rms is between 4% and 10%. We found a possible additional peak at 164 Hz when selecting a subset of the data; however, at the 4.5σ level we consider this detection marginal. These QPOs have hard spectrum and are stronger in observations performed between 2011 September and October, during which IGR J17091-3624 displayed for the first time light curves that resemble those of the γ variability class in GRS 1915+105. We find that the 66 Hz QPO is also present in previous observations (4.5σ), but only when averaging ~235 ks of relatively high count rate data. The fact that the HFQPOs frequency in IGR J17091-3624 matches surprisingly well with that seen in GRS 1915+105 raises questions on the mass scaling of QPOs frequency in these two systems. We discuss some possible interpretations; however, they all strongly depend on the distance and mass of IGR J17091-3624, both completely unconstrained today.