Revealing the nature of HMXBs through multi-wavelength and statistical analyses

Details Revealing the nature of HMXBs through multi-wavelength and statistical analyses Revealing the nature of HMXBs through multi-wavelength and statistical analyses

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010fym..confe..27b&link_type=abstract

"The First Year of MAXI: Monitoring Variable X-ray Sources", 4th International MAXI Workshop held November 30 - December 2, 2010

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Around 100 high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) belonging to the Milky Way have been detected above 20 keV. This energy range is important because it holds clues to the accretion processes driving the emission, and sometimes the identity of the compact object itself. While many of these HMXBs were discovered in the hard X-rays, clarifying their nature required subsequent observations with telescopes operating at lower energies. First, we summarize recent results of our long-term follow-up campaign to help clarify the nature of HMXBs. Specifically, we present highlights from Suzaku observations of XTE J1739-302 and IGR J16207-5129, as well as HMXBs observed with Chandra, Swift, XMM-Newton, and optical/IR telescopes. Thanks to the expanding ranks of HMXBs in our Galaxy, we are able to perform more reliable statistical analyses on the three currently-known types of HMXB: those with supergiant companions (SGXBs); those with Be companions (BEXBs); and the enigmatic Supergiant Fast X- ray Transients (SFXTs). We present new diagnostic tools, akin to the "Corbet diagram," in which HMXBs tend to segregate based on their dominant accretion mechanism. We show how these diagrams can help constrain models of accreting pulsars, and how they illustrate the way in which SFXTs span across the divided populations of BEXBs and SGXBs, bolstering the intriguing possibility that some SFXTs represent an evolutionary link. Using the latest Galactic spiral arm model, we revisit the use of HMXBs as tracers of recent massive star formation, in particular for sources in the direction of the inner spiral arms. We present the first ever spatial correlation function for HMXBs and OB-forming complexes. Our results indicate that at distances less than a few kpc from a given HMXB, it is more likely to have neighbors that are known massive-star forming regions as opposed to objects drawn from random distributions. We investigate the implications that this has for kick velocities that can be achieved during the birth of these systems.

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