3D Hydrodynamic & Radiative Transfer Models of X-ray Emission from Colliding Wind Binaries
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 3000 km s, and their collision leads to hot plasma (up to K) that emit thermal X-rays (up to 10 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 Carinae and WR 140. The models reproduce the observations well away from periastron passage, but only 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"