Related papers: On Relativistic Disk Spectroscopy in Compact Objec…
Pre-main sequence stars are variable sources. In stars with disks, this variability is related to the morphology of the inner circumstellar region (<0.1 AU) and that of the photosphere and corona, all impossible to be spatially resolved…
Since the initial exploration of soft gamma-ray sky in the 60's, high-energy celestial sources have been mainly characterized through imaging, spectroscopy and timing analysis. Despite tremendous progress in the field, the radiation…
The models that seek to explain the reflection spectrum in black hole binaries usually invoke a point-like primary source of hard X-rays. This source illuminates the accretion disk and gives rise to the discrete (lines) and…
The Ultra-luminous Compact X-ray Sources (ULXs) in nearby spiral galaxies and the Galactic super-luminal jet sources share the common spectral characteristic that they have extremely high disk temperatures which cannot be explained in the…
Black holes of stellar mass and neutron stars in binary systems are first detected as hard X-ray sources using high-energy space telescopes. Relativistic jets in some of these compact sources are found by means of multiwavelength…
Recent developments in the spectropolarimetric study of compact objects, specifically black holes (stellar and massive) and neutron stars are reviewed. The lectures are organized around five topics: disks, jets, outflows, neutron stars and…
In recent decades, developments in detectors for X-ray imaging have improved dose efficiency. This has been accomplished with for example, structured scintillators such as columnar CsI, or with direct detectors where the X rays are…
In X-ray binary star systems consisting of a compact object that accretes material from an orbiting secondary star, there is no straightforward means to decide if the compact object is a black hole or a neutron star. To assist this…
Time-resolved optical and infrared polarimetric observations of black hole and neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries are presented. Data were acquired with the VLT, UKIRT and HIPPO on the SAAO 1.9-m. We find that for some sources in…
Using the X-ray data taken with ASCA, a detailed analysis was made of intensity and spectral variations of three ultra-luminous extra-galactic compact X-ray sources (ULXs); IC 342 source 1, M81 X-6, and NGC 1313 source B, all exhibiting…
We present the first significant detection of relativistic smearing of the X-ray reflection spectrum from the putative accretion disk in the low/hard state of Cyg X--1. The ionization state, and amount of relativistic smearing are…
A Scintillator Deposited CCD (SDCCD) is a wide-band X-ray detector consisting of a CCD and a scintillator directly attached to each other. We assembled the newly developed SDCCD that the scintillator CsI(Tl) is below the fully depleted CCD.…
In astronomy there are basically four kinds of observations to extract the information carried by electromagnetic radiation: photometry, imaging, spectroscopy and polarimetry. By optimal exploitation of the first three techniques, X-ray…
Using the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer we have measured lags of the 9 to 33 keV photons relative to the 2 to 9 keV photons in the timing noise between 0.01 and 100 Hz in the accreting neutron stars 4U 0614+091 and 4U 1705-44. We performed…
X-ray binaries are excellent laboratories to study collapsed objects. On the one hand, transient X-ray binaries contain the best examples of stellar-mass black holes while persistent X-ray binaries mostly harbour accreting neutron stars.…
X-ray binaries provide exceptional laboratories for understanding the physics of matter under the most extreme conditions. Until recently, there were few, if any, observational constraints on the circumbinary environments of X-ray binaries…
Capturing depth and reflectivity images at low light levels from active illumination of a scene has wide-ranging applications. Conventionally, even with single-photon detectors, hundreds of photon detections are needed at each pixel to…
We present a reduction pipeline for CCD (charge-coupled device) images which was built to search for variable sources in highly crowded fields like the M31 bulge and to handle extensive databases due to large time series. We describe all…
There is currently vast evidence for Dark Matter (DM) from astronomical observations. However, in spite of tremendous efforts by large experimental groups, there is no confirmed direct detection of the dark matter in our galaxy. Recent…
Using hard (E>10 keV) X-ray observations with NuSTAR, we are able to differentiate between accretion states, and thus compact object types, of neutron stars and black holes in X-ray binaries (XRBs) in M31, our nearest Milky Way-type…