Related papers: Be/X-ray binaries
In a recent paper Martin & Lubow showed that a circumbinary disc around an eccentric binary can undergo damped nodal oscillations that lead to the polar (perpendicular) alignment of the disc relative to the binary orbit. The disc angular…
I discuss the X-ray observations of Be stars, and how their properties compare to non-emission B stars. I focus on several specific stars that show high flux levels and variability but also report on several interesting survey results. The…
This paper reviews the rich corpus of observational evidence for tidal effects in short-period binaries. We review the evidence for ellipsoidal variability and for the observational manifestation of apsidal motion in eclipsing binaries.…
Our aim is to investigate tidal interaction in High-Mass X-ray Binary stars in order to determine in which objects the rotation of the mass donors is synchronized or pseudosynchronized with the orbital motion of the compact companion. We…
Context. Ultracompact X-ray binaries (UCXBs) typically consist of a white dwarf donor and a neutron star or black hole accretor. The evolution of UCXBs and very low mass ratio binaries in general is poorly understood. Aims. We investigate…
Several mechanisms have been proposed for the formation of brown dwarfs, but there is as yet no consensus as to which -- if any -- are operative in nature. Any theory of brown dwarf formation must explain the observed statistics of brown…
Accretion discs are present around both stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries and supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. A wide variety of circumstantial evidence implies that many of these discs are warped. The standard…
The theory of radiatively-induced warps in accretion discs is applied to the discs of Be stars. It is found that these discs may develop warps in their inner regions, although once the warp amplitude is large enough then the interaction…
Observations of accreting neutron stars (NS) with strong magnetic fields can be used not only for studying the accretion flow interaction with NS magnetospheres, but also for understanding the physical processes inside NSs and for…
Recent discoveries have confirmed the existence of a large population of X-ray sources fuelled by accretion from the stellar wind of an OB supergiant. Such systems are powerful laboratories to study many aspects of astrophysics. Over the…
Recent observations have shown that circumstellar and circumbinary discs in young stellar binaries are often misaligned with respect to the binary orbital plane. We analyze the tidal truncation of such misaligned discs due to torques…
The formation of a binary system surrounded by disks is the most common outcome of stellar formation. Hence studying and understanding the formation and the evolution of binary systems and associated disks is a cornerstone of star formation…
In this chapter we review the formation and evolution of compact binaries with neutron star and/or black hole components (i.e. LMXBs, HMXBs, binary pulsars). After an introduction we discuss stellar evolution in binaries and the processes…
In a previous work (Pichardo et al. 2005), we studied stable configurations for circumstellar discs in eccentric binary systems. We searched for "invariant loops": closed curves (analogous to stable periodic orbits in time-independent…
X-ray binaries are binary star systems in which a compact object (a neutron star or a black hole) and a relatively normal star orbit a common centre of mass. Since the discovery of X-ray binaries with the first X-ray telescopes in the…
The environment of a binary star system may contain two circumstellar disks, one orbiting each of the stars, and a circumbinary disk orbiting about the entire binary. The disk structure and evolution are modified by the presence of the…
Binary stars are as common as single stars. The number of detected planets orbiting binaries is rapidly increasing thanks to the synergy between transit surveys, Gaia and high-resolution direct imaging campaigns. However, global planet…
Short-period binary star systems dissipate orbital energy through tidal interactions that lead to tighter, more circular orbits. When at least one star in a binary has evolved off of the main sequence, orbital circularization occurs for…
Observations of systems hosting close in ($<1$ AU) giant planets and brown dwarfs ($M\gtrsim7$ M$_{\rm Jup}$) find an excess of binary star companions, indicating that stellar multiplicity may play an important role in their formation.…
The Be star $\pi$ Aquarii shows peculiar $\gamma$ Cas-type X-ray emission, likely caused by its outer disk interacting with a low-mass companion, probably a white dwarf. We study the long-term variability of its optical spectra to derive…