Related papers: Coronal ejection and heating in variable-luminosit…
A number of stellar astrophysical phenomena, such as tidal novae and planetary engulfment, involve sudden injection of sub-binding energy in a thin layer within the star, leading to mass ejection of the stellar envelope. We use a 1D…
Determining the heating mechanism (or mechanisms) that causes the outer atmosphere of the Sun, and many other stars, to reach temperatures orders of magnitude higher than their surface temperatures has long been a key problem. For decades…
We generalize the problem of the semi-gray model to cases in which a non-negligible fraction of the stellar radiation falls on the long-wavelength range, and/or that the planetary long-wavelength emission penetrates into the transparent…
Ultralight bosons such as axions and dark photons are well-motivated hypothetical particles, whose couplings to ordinary matter can be effectively constrained by stellar cooling. Limits on these interactions can be obtained by demanding…
One of the outstanding problems in all of space science is uncovering how the solar corona is heated to temperatures greater than 1 MK. Though studied for decades, one of the major difficulties in solving this problem has been unraveling…
Quiescent X-ray luminosities are presented in low mass X-ray binaries with use of evolutionary calculations. The calculated luminosities are compared with observed ones in terms of timeaveraged mass accretion rate. It is shown that neutrino…
X-ray emission from stars in the cool half of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is generally attributed to the presence of a magnetic corona that contains plasma at temperatures exceeding 1 million K. Coronae are ubiquitous among these stars,…
Clusters of galaxies are thought to contain about ten times as much dark matter as baryonic matter. The dark component therefore dominates the gravitational potential of the cluster, and the baryons confined by this potential radiate X-rays…
Axions may be produced thermally inside the cores of neutron stars (NSs), escape the stars due to their feeble interactions with matter, and subsequently convert into X-rays in the magnetic fields surrounding the stars. We show that a…
Supercritical accretion onto compact objects powers a massive wind that is optically thick and Eddington-limited. If most of the hard X-rays from the central disk are obscured by the wind, the source will display a blackbody-like spectrum…
Dark kinetic heating of neutron stars has been previously studied as a promising dark matter detection avenue. Kinetic heating occurs when dark matter is sped up to relativistic speeds in the gravitational well of high-escape velocity…
The anomalously large radii of strongly irradiated exoplanets have remained a major puzzle in astronomy. Based on a 2D steady state atmospheric circulation model, the validity of which is assessed by comparison to 3D calculations, we reveal…
There is abundant evidence that heating processes in the central regions of elliptical galaxies has both prevented large-scale cooling flows and assisted in the expulsion of metal rich gas. We now know that each such spheroidal system…
Planets in close orbits around their host stars are subject to strong irradiation. High-energy irradiation, originating from the stellar corona and chromosphere, is mainly responsible for the evaporation of exoplanetary atmospheres. We have…
X-ray emission from AGN is believed to be produced via Comptonization of optical/UV seed photons emitted by the accretion disk, up-scattered by hot electrons in a corona surrounding the black hole. A critical compactness vs. temperature…
The spectral and timing properties of an oscillating hot thermal corona are investigated. This oscillation is assumed to be due to a magneto-acoustic wave propagating within the corona and triggered by an external, non specified,…
The presence or lack of eclipses in the X-ray lightcurves of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) can be directly linked to the accreting system geometry. In the case where the compact object is stellar mass and radiates isotropically, we…
X-ray spectroscopy of cooling-flow clusters reveal an unexpected deficit of soft X-ray emission lines from gas at ~1/3 of the ambient plasma temperature, across a wide range of X-ray luminosities and virial temperatures. We propose excess…
The extreme extragalactic sources known as Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULX) represent a unique testing environment for compact objects population studies and the accretion process. Their nature has long been disputed. Their luminosity,…
It is commonly believed that the optical/UV and X-ray emissions in luminous AGN are produced in an accretion disk and an embedded hot corona respectively. The inverse Compton scattering of disk photons by hot electrons in the corona can…