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Most ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are thought to be supercritical accreting compact objects, where massive outflows are inevitable. Using the long-term monitoring data with the Swift X-ray Telescope, we identified a common feature in…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2018-02-14 Shan-Shan Weng , Hua Feng

Most Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are thought to be powered by super-Eddington accretion onto stellar-mass compact objects. Accretors in this extreme regime are naturally expected to ionise copious amounts of plasma in their vicinity…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-10-13 P. Kosec , C. Pinto , C. S. Reynolds , M. Guainazzi , E. Kara , D. J. Walton , A. C. Fabian , M. L. Parker , I. Valtchanov

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) represent the closest and most accessible laboratories to study sustained super-Eddington accretion onto compact objects. Over the past decade, the discoveries of coherent pulsations in a few ULXs has…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-12-24 R. Amato , M. Bachetti , R. Soria , A. Gúrpide , M. Imbrogno , C. Salvaggio , R. Salvaterra , M. Del Santo , S. Scaringi , P. Casella , A. Wolter

It is thought that ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are mainly powered by super-Eddington accreting neutron stars or black holes as shown by recent discovery of X-ray pulsations and relativistic winds. This work presents a follow up study…

If ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are powered by accretion onto stellar remnant black holes, then many must be accreting at super-Eddington rates. It is predicted that such high accretion rates should give rise to massive,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-10-15 Andrew D. Sutton , Timothy P. Roberts , Matthew J. Middleton

It has recently been discovered that a fraction of ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) exhibit X-ray pulsations, and are therefore powered by super-Eddington accretion onto magnetized neutron stars (NSs). For typical ULX mass accretion…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2019-01-17 Alexander A. Mushtukov , Adam Ingram , Matthew Middleton , Dmitrij I. Nagirner , Michiel van der Klis

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are extragalactic X-ray emitters located off-center of their host galaxy and with a luminosity in excess of a few ${10^{39}\text{ erg s}^{-1}}$, if emitted isotropically. The discovery of periodic…

We report on XMM-Newton/Chandra/Swift/HST observations of the ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) in NGC 247, which is found to make transitions between the supersoft ultraluminous (SSUL) regime with a spectrum dominated by a cool ($\sim 0.1$…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-11-09 Hua Feng , Lian Tao , Philip Kaaret , Fabien Grise

Most ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are believed to be stellar mass black holes or neutron stars accreting beyond the Eddington limit. Determining the nature of the compact object and the accretion mode from broadband spectroscopy is…

We assess the claim that Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) host intermediate-mass black holes (BH) by comparing the cool disc-blackbody model with a range of other models, namelly a more complex physical model based on a power-law…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 A. C. Goncalves , R. Soria

We show that ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) with coherent X-ray pulsing (PULXs) probably have neutron-star spin axes significantly misaligned from their central accretion discs. Scattering in the funnels collimating their emission and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-04-15 Andrew King , Jean-Pierre Lasota

The discovery of pulsations in several Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) demonstrated that a fraction of ULXs are powered by super-Eddington accretion onto neutron stars (NSs). This opened the debate as to what is the NS to black hole (BH)…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-05-26 Andrés Gúrpide , Olivier Godet , Filippos Koliopanos , Natalie Webb , Jean-François Olive

With the discovery of pulsations in some of the ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), it is quite clear that most of the ULXs harbor either a neutron star or a stellar mass black hole as a compact object accreting at super-Eddington rates.…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-09-12 Manish Kumar , Rahul Sharma , Biswajit Paul

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are off-nuclear point sources in nearby galaxies with luminosities well exceeding the Eddington limit for stellar-mass objects. It has been recognized after the discovery of pulsating ULXs (PULXs) that a…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-01-22 M. Hakan Erkut , K. Yavuz Ekşi

The lack of unambiguous detections of atomic features in the X-ray spectra of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) has proven a hindrance in diagnosing the nature of the accretion flow. The possible association of spectral residuals at soft…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-10-28 Matthew J. Middleton , Dominic J. Walton , Andrew Fabian , Timothy P. Roberts , Lucy Heil , Ciro Pinto , Gemma Anderson , Andrew Sutton

We show that black holes supplied with mass at hyper--Eddington rates drive outflows with mildly sub--relativistic velocities. These are $\sim 0.1 - 0.2c$ for Eddington accretion factors $\dot m_{\rm acc} \sim 10 - 100$, and $\sim…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-11-18 Andrew King , Stuart I. Muldrew

Although attempts have been made to constrain the stellar types of optical counterparts to ULXs, the detection of optical variability instead suggests that they may be dominated by reprocessed emission from X-rays which irradiate the outer…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-22 Andrew D. Sutton , Chris Done , Timothy P. Roberts

The origin of Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in external galaxies whose X-ray luminosities exceed those of the brightest black holes in our Galaxy by hundreds and thousands of times is mysterious. The most popular models for the ULXs…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-01-27 Sergei Fabrika , Alexander Vinokurov , Kirill Atapin

Ultraluminous X-ray sources are non-nuclear point sources exceeding the Eddington luminosity of a 10 Solar mass black hole. Modern consensus for a majority of the ULX population is that they are powered by stellar-mass black holes or…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-12-20 P. Kosec , C. Pinto , A. C. Fabian , D. J. Walton

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) with luminosities lying between ~3x10^{39} - 2x10^{40} erg/s represent a contentious sample of objects as their brightness, together with a lack of unambiguous mass estimates for the vast majority of the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-23 Matthew Middleton , Lucy Heil , Fabio Pintore , Dominic Walton , Timothy Roberts