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Related papers: Ultraluminous X-Ray Sources

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Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are a class of accreting compact objects with X-ray luminosities above 1e39 erg/s. The ULX population counts several hundreds objects but only a minor fraction is well studied. Here we present a detailed…

The luminosity range at and just below the 10^39 erg/s cut-off for defining ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) is a little-explored regime. It none-the-less hosts a large number of X-ray sources, and has great potential for improving our…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-03-03 Hannah M. Earnshaw , Timothy P. Roberts

Luminosities of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are uncomfortably large if compared to the Eddington limit for isotropic accretion onto stellar-mass object. Most often either supercritical accretion onto stellar mass black hole or…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-24 V. Doroshenko , A. Santangelo , L. Ducci

We report the discovery of a new ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) associated with a globular cluster in the elliptical galaxy NGC 4649. The X-ray source was initially detected with a luminosity below 5 x 10^38 erg/s, but in subsequent…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-11 T. P. Roberts , G. Fabbiano , B. Luo , D. -W. Kim , J. Strader , M. J. Middleton , J. P. Brodie , T. Fragos , J. S. Gallagher , V. Kalogera , A. R. King , A. Zezas

Nearby galaxies host ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs), whose nature remains largely unknown. Until the discovery of the first ULX pulsar, M82 X-2, the mechanism powering the large luminosities of most ULXs was thought to be…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-01-25 J. J. E. Kajava , F. Rico-Villas

One hundred fifty-four discrete non-nuclear Ultra-Luminous X-ray (ULX) sources, with intrinsic X-ray luminosities >1e39 ergs/s, are identified in 82 galaxies observed with Chandra's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer. Source positions, X-ray…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Douglas A. Swartz , Kajal K. Ghosh , Allyn F. Tennant , Kinwah Wu

Variability is a powerful tool to investigate properties of X-ray binaries (XRB), in particular for Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) that are mainly detected in the X-ray band. For most ULXs the nature of the accretor is unknown, although…

Since their discovery, Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) have attracted attention due to their combination of extreme luminosities and extra-nuclear locations. However, they are a fairly rare phenomenon, and attempts to investigate the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-05-20 D. J. Walton , J. C. Gladstone , T. P. Roberts , A. C. Fabian

We suggest that the ultraluminous X-ray sources located in external galaxies (ULXs) are supercritical accretion disks like that in SS433, observed close to the disk axis. We estimate parameters of the SS433 funnel, where the relativistic…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-11 S. Fabrika , S. Karpov , P. Abolmasov , O. Sholukhova

In the last few years multiwavelength observations have boosted our understanding of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULXs). Yet, the most fundamental questions on ULXs still remain to be definitively answered: do they contain stellar or…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-05-18 L. Zampieri , M. Colpi , M. Mapelli , A. Patruno , T. P. Roberts

Ultraluminous X-ray binaries have challenged our assumptions of extreme accretion rates in X-ray binaries, and impact other subfields of astronomy, such as cosmology, gravitational wave sources and supernov{\ae}. Our understanding of ULXs…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-07-03 Kristen C. Dage , Konstantinos Kovlakas

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) with Lx > 10^{39} ergs/s have been discovered in great numbers in external galaxies with ROSAT, Chandra, and XMM. The central question regarding this important class of sources is whether they represent an…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Saul Rappaport , Philipp Podsiadlowski , Eric Pfahl

A fraction of the Ultra Luminous X-ray (ULX) sources are known to be accreting neutron stars as they show coherent X-ray pulsations with pulse periods ranging from ~1-30 seconds. While initially thought to host intermediate-mass black…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-07-22 Manish Kumar , Rahul Sharma , Biswajit Paul , Vikram Rana

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are off-nuclear X-ray sources in nearby galaxies with X-ray luminosities $\geq$ 10$^{39}$ erg s$^{-1}$. The measurement of the black hole (BH) masses of ULXs is a long-standing problem. Here we estimate…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-23 Xin-Lin Zhou

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) have been objects of great interest for the past few decades due to their unusually high luminosities and spectral properties. A few of these sources exhibit super-Eddington luminosities assuming them to…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-11-28 Mayank Pathak , Banibrata Mukhopadhyay

I suggest that there are two classes of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs), corresponding to super-Eddington mass inflow in two situations: (a) thermal-timescale mass transfer in high-mass X-ray binaries, and (b) long-lasting transient…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-07 A. R. King

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…

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are our best laboratories for studying extreme super-Eddington accretion. Most studies of these objects are of relatively persistent sources, however there is growing evidence to suggest a large fraction…

The classical limit on the accretion luminosity of a neutron star is given by the Eddington luminosity. The advanced models of accretion onto magnetized neutron stars account for the appearance of magnetically confined accretion columns and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2018-03-14 Alexander A. Mushtukov , Sergey S. Tsygankov , Valery F. Suleimanov , Juri Poutanen

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are a class of accreting compact objects with X-ray luminosities above 10$^{39}$ erg s$^{-1}$. The average number of ULXs per galaxy is still not well constrained, especially given the uncertainty on the…