H{\alpha} imaging for BeXRBs in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Abstract
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) hosts a large number of high-mass X-ray binaries, and in particular of Be/X-ray Binaries (BeXRBs; neutron stars orbiting OBe-type stars), offering a unique laboratory to address the effect of metalicity. One key property of their optical companion is H{\alpha} in emission, which makes them bright sources when observed through a narrow-band H{\alpha} filter. We performed a survey of the SMC Bar and Wing regions using wide-field cameras (WFI@MPG/ESO and MOSAIC@CTIO/Blanco) in order to identify the counterparts of the sources detected in our XMM-Newton survey of the same area. We obtained broad-band R and narrow-band H{\alpha} photometry, and identified ~10000 H{\alpha} emission sources down to a sensitivity limit of 18.7 mag (equivalent to ~B8 type Main Sequence stars). We find the fraction of OBe/OB stars to be 13% down to this limit, and by investigating this fraction as a function of the brightness of the stars we deduce that H{\alpha} excess peaks at the O9-B2 spectral range. Using the most up-to-date numbers of SMC BeXRBs we find their fraction over their parent population to be ~0.002-0.025 BeXRBs/OBe, a direct measurement of their formation rate.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1702.04606,
title = {H{\alpha} imaging for BeXRBs in the Small Magellanic Cloud},
author = {Grigoris Maravelias and Andreas Zezas and Vallia Antoniou and Despina Hatzidimitriou and Frank Haberl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.04606},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
3 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, to appear in the proceedings (Splinter Session) of the IAU Symposium 329 "The lives and death-throes of massive stars" (Auckland, New Zealand, 28 November - 2 December 2017). In the current version references changed to Harvard style along with some small text rephrasing to keep the same size of the paper, reflecting the submitted version