Related papers: X-ray Polarization from High Mass X-ray Binaries
X-ray polarimetry has seen a growing interest in recent years. Improvements in detector technology and focusing X-ray optics now enable sensitive astrophysical X-ray polarization measurements. These measurements will provide new insights…
In this review I briefly describe the nature of the three kinds of High-Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs), accreting through: (i) Be circumstellar disc, (ii) supergiant stellar wind, and (iii) Roche lobe filling supergiants. A previously unknown…
Recent X-ray polarimetric data on the prototypical black hole X-ray binary Cyg~X-1 from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer present tight constraints on accretion geometry in the hard spectral state. Contrary to general expectations of a…
Strongly magnetized, accreting neutron stars show periodic and aperiodic variability over a wide range of time scales. By obtaining spectral and timing information on these different time scales, we can have a closer look into the physics…
High mass X-ray binaries hold the promise of giving us understanding of the structure of the winds of their supermassive companion stars by using the emission from the compact object as a backlight to evaluate the variable absorption in the…
X-ray polarimetry has the potential to make key-contributions to our understanding of galactic compact objects like binary black hole systems and neutron stars, and extragalactic objects like active galactic nuclei, blazars, and Gamma Ray…
Precise knowledge of the features of several X-ray sources from compact binary sources to galactic nuclei is gradually unveiling the physical parameters of relativistic neutron stars and black holes therein. Recent developments in theory,…
X-ray binaries (XRBs) are probes of both star formation and stellar mass, but more importantly remain one of the only direct tracers of the compact object population. To investigate the XRB population in M31, we utilized all 121 publicly…
A black hole x-ray binary (XRB) system forms when gas is stripped from a normal star and accretes onto a black hole, which heats the gas sufficiently to emit x-rays. We report a polarimetric observation of the XRB Cygnus X-1 using the…
The radio/X-ray correlation is one of the most important pieces of observational evidence of the disk-jet connection in accreting compact objects. However, a growing number of X-ray binaries seem to present deviations from the universal…
Microlensing is one of the most promising tools for discovering stellar-mass black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way because it allows us to probe dark or faint celestial compact objects. While the existence of stellar-mass BHs has been…
Accreting X-ray pulsars are among the most luminous objects in the X-ray sky. In highly magnetized neutron stars (B~10^12 G), the flow of matter is dominated by the strong magnetic field. The general properties of accreting X-ray binaries…
The light received by source stars in microlensing events may be significantly polarized if both an efficient photon scattering mechanism is active in the source stellar atmosphere and a differential magnification is therein induced by the…
X-ray sources in spiral galaxies can be approximately classified into bulge and disk populations. The bulge (or hard) sources have X-ray colors which are consistent with Low Mass X-ray Binaries (LMXB) but the the disk sources have softer…
Rotating axisymmetric objects amplify incoming waves by superradiant scattering. When enclosed in a cavity, the repeated interaction of a confined field with the object may trigger superradiant instabilities. Rotating binaries are…
Stellar companion of a black hole orbiting in an eccentric orbit will experience modulating tidal force with a periodicity same as that of the orbital period. This, in turn, would modulate accretion rates, and the seed photon flux which are…
We have developed a clumpy stellar wind model for OB supergiants in order to compare predictions of this model with the X-ray behaviour of both classes of persistent and transient High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs).
I start with a discussion of spherical winds and small-scale clumping, before continuing with various theories that have been proposed to predict how mass loss depends on stellar rotation -- both in terms of wind strength, as well as the…
Blazars are a class of jet-dominated active galactic nuclei with a typical double-humped spectral energy distribution. It is of common consensus the Synchrotron emission to be responsible for the low frequency peak, while the origin of the…
Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal…