English

3D Hydrodynamic & Radiative Transfer Models of X-ray Emission from Colliding Wind Binaries

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2014-05-20 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Colliding wind binaries (CWBs) are unique laboratories for X-ray astrophysics. The massive stars in these systems possess powerful stellar winds with speeds up to \sim3000 km s1^{-1}, and their collision leads to hot plasma (up to 108\sim10^8K) that emit thermal X-rays (up to \sim10 keV). Many X-ray telescopes have observed CWBs, including Suzaku, and our work aims to model these X-ray observations. We use 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to model the wind-wind interaction, and then perform 3D radiative transfer to compute the emergent X-ray flux, which is folded through X-ray telescopes' response functions to compare directly with observations. In these proceedings, we present our models of Suzaku observations of the multi-year-period, highly eccentric systems η\eta Carinae and WR 140. The models reproduce the observations well away from periastron passage, but only η\eta Carinae's X-ray spectrum is reproduced at periastron; the WR 140 model produces too much flux during this more complicated phase.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.4803,
  title  = {3D Hydrodynamic & Radiative Transfer Models of X-ray Emission from Colliding Wind Binaries},
  author = {Christopher M. P. Russell and Atsuo T. Okazaki and Stanley P. Owocki and Michael F. Corcoran and Kenji Hamaguchi and Yasuharu Sugawara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.4803},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

2 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings from "Suzaku-MAXI 2014: Expanding the Frontiers of the X-ray Universe"