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Supercritical accretion onto compact objects may drive massive winds that are nearly spherical, optically thick, and Eddington limited. Blackbody emission from the photosphere is the direct observational signature of the wind. Here we…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-01-13 Yanli Qiu , Hua Feng

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

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-/hyper-luminous X-ray sources (ULX/HLX) could be interesting laboratories to improve our understanding of the supermassive black hole growth through super-Eddington accretion episodes and successive mergers of lighter holes. ULXs are…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-01-10 Hugo Tranin , Natalie Webb , Olivier Godet , Erwan Quintin

The presence of radiatively driven outflows is well established in ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). These outflows are optically thick and can reprocess a significant fraction of the accretion luminosity. Assuming isotropic emission,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2021-10-27 Matthew Middleton , Nick Higginbottom , Christian Knigge , Norman Khan , Grzegorz Wiktorowicz

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

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…

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are point-like sources that exhibit apparent X-ray luminosities exceeding the Eddington limit for stellar-mass compact objects. A widely accepted interpretation is that these systems are X-ray binaries…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-01-21 Lucas M. Pasquevich , Gustavo E. Romero , Matías M. Reynoso

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

The radiation spectra of many of the brightest ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are dominated by a hard power law component, likely powered by a hot, optically thin corona that Comptonizes soft seed photons emitted from a cool, optically…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Aristotle Socrates , Shane W. Davis

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

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) were identified as a separate class of objects in 2000 based on data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. These are unique objects: their X-ray luminosities exceed the Eddington limit for a typical…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-05-25 S. N. Fabrika , K. E. Atapin , A. S. Vinokurov , O. N. Sholukhova

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) represent an extreme class of accreting compact objects: from the identification of some of the accretors as neutron stars to the detection of powerful winds travelling at 0.1-0.2 c, the increasing…

The luminosities of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) require an exotic solution with either super-critical accretion modes onto stellar mass black holes or sub-critical accretion onto intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) being invoked.…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-17 Matthew J. Middleton , Dominic J. Walton , Timothy P. Roberts , Lucy Heil

The nature of ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) has long been plagued by an ambiguity about whether the central compact objects are intermediate-mass (IMBH, >~ 10^3 M_sun) or stellar-mass (a few tens M_sun) black holes (BHs). The high…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-01-09 Rong-Feng Shen , Rodolfo Barniol Duran , Ehud Nakar , Tsvi Piran

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULX) are off-nuclear point sources in nearby galaxies whose X-ray luminosity exceeds the theoretical maximum for spherical infall (the Eddington limit) onto stellar-mass black holes. Their luminosity ranges from…

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

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…

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