Related papers: Disc Instabilities in Soft X-ray Transients
A thermal/viscous instability of the accretion disc arising when hydrogen is partially ionized is the most popular explanation of the outbursts of both dwarf novae (DN) and soft X-ray transients (SXT). During an outburst, the disc expands…
Using the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics code, we investigate the influences of irradiation on ultra-compact X-ray binary (UCXB) evolution. Although the persistent UCXBs have short orbital periods which result in high…
The X-ray light-curves of the recurring outbursts observed in low-mass X-ray binaries provide strong test beds for constraining (still) poorly understood disc-accretion processes. These light-curves act as a powerful diagnostic to probe the…
A significant number of X-ray binaries are now known to exhibit long-term ``superorbital'' periodicities on timescales of $\sim$ 10 - 100 days. Several physical mechanisms have been proposed that give rise to such periodicities, in…
The recent emergence of a new class of accretion-powered, transient, millisecond X-ray pulsars presents some difficulties for the conventional picture of accretion onto rapidly rotating magnetized neutron stars and their spin behavior…
INTEGRAL monitoring of the Galactic Plane is revealing a growing number of recurrent X-ray transients, characterised by short outbursts with very fast rise times (~ tens of minutes) and typical durations of a few hours. A substantial…
We have analyzed {\it Rossi} X-ray timing explorer (RXTE) pointed observations of the outbursts of black hole and neutron star soft X-ray transients in which an initial low/hard state or `island' state, followed by a transition to a softer…
We study the evolution of newborn neutron stars in high-mass X-ray binaries interacting with a wind-fed super-Eddington disk. The inner disk is regularized to a radiation-dominated quasi-spherical configuration for which we calculate the…
Millisecond x-ray pulsars have weak magnetic dipole moments of $\sim 10^{16}$\,T\,m$^3$ compared to ordinary X-ray pulsars with dipole moments of $10^{20}$\,T\,m$^3$. For this reason a surrounding accretion disc can extend closer to the…
We study the mass transfer rates and disk stability conditions of ultracompact X-ray binaries (UCXBs) using empirical time-averaged X-ray luminosities from Paper I (Cartwright et al. 2013) and compiled information from the literature. The…
Many X-ray binaries are transiently accreting. Having statistics on their recurrence times is helpful to address questions related to binary evolution and populations, as well as the physics of binary systems. We compile a catalog of known…
We show that the X-ray outburst light curves of four transient anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) and soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs), namely XTE J1810-197, SGR 0501+4516, SGR 1627-41 and CXOU J164710.2-455216, can be produced by the fallback…
We consider evolutionary models for the population of short-period (<10 hr) low-mass black-hole binaries (LMBHBs) and compare them with observations of soft X-ray transients (SXTs). We show that assuming strongly reduced magnetic braking…
Dipping neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries (NS LMXBs) are systems that exhibit periodic drops in their X-ray light curves. These are believed to be caused by material at the impact point of the gas stream onto the accretion disk, the…
The hard to soft state transition of the outbursts in X-ray binaries (XRBs) is triggered by the rising of the mass accretion rate due to the disk instability. In order to explain the observed correlation between the hard X-ray transition…
Recurring outbursts associated with matter flowing onto compact stellar remnants (black-holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs) in close binary systems, provide strong test beds for constraining the poorly understood accretion process. The…
X-ray irradiation in X-ray binaries is thought to control the behavior at the outer disc, which is observable mainly at optical wavelengths. It is generally parameterized phenomenologically, but it can also be predicted from theoretical…
A millisecond pulsar is a neutron star that has been substantially spun up by accretion from a binary companion. A previously unrecognized factor governing the spin evolution of such pulsars is the crucial effect of non-steady or transient…
Be/X-ray binary systems exhibit both periodic (Type I) X-ray outbursts and giant (Type II) outbursts, whose origin has remained elusive. We suggest that Type II X-ray outbursts occur when a highly misaligned decretion disk around the Be…
In this paper we report on the spectral analysis of seven X-ray transients, which were found to be active during a monitoring campaign of the Galactic center carried out in 2006 and 2007 using the X-ray telescope aboard the Swift satellite.…