Related papers: ULXs, Microblazars, and the Unidentified EGRET sou…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Observatory discovered about a thousand extragalactic sources emitting energy from 100 MeV to 100 GeV. The majority of these sources belong to the class of blazars characterized by a quasi-featureless optical spectrum…
The origin of the high X-ray luminosities of most ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) still remains poorly understood. Most of the scenarios proposed to explain their nature assume that ULXs are powered by accretion on to a black hole (BH).…
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…
Microquasars are stellar x-ray binaries that behave as a scaled down version of extragalactic quasars. The star LS 5039 is a new microquasar system with apparent persistent ejection of relativistic plasma at a 3 kiloparsec distance from the…
The twelve bright (Lx>10(36) erg/s) X-ray sources in the globular clusters have lower luminosities than the brightest sources in the bulge of our galaxy. The dim (Lx<10(35) erg/s) X-ray sources in globular clusters reach higher luminosities…
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…
An XMM-Newton study of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULX) has been performed in a sample of 10 nearby Seyfert galaxies. Eighteen ULX have been found with positional uncertainty of about 4". The large collecting area of XMM-Newton makes the…
The focus of NASA's Swift telescope has been transients and target-of-opportunity observing, resulting in many observations of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) over the last ~20 years. For the vast majority of these observations,…
The vast majority of the high-energy gamma-ray sources discovered by EGRET are still unidentified. Percentages range from 50% at high galactic latitudes, where blazars are responsible for almost all identified sources, to more than 90% near…
Presently there are several classes of detected gamma-ray extragalatic sources. They are mostly associated to active galactic nuclei (AGN) and (at soft gamma rays) to gamma-ray bursts (GRB), but not only. Active galactic nuclei consist of…
I give a brief review of how X-rays from nearby galaxies are used as direct tracers of recent star formation. This leads to the conclusion that it is the most luminous point-like sources that are associated with star formation and that the…
It is becoming clear that luminous extragalactic X-ray and sub-mm sources are essentially distinct populations. Thus, if high redshift sub-mm sources represent massive spheroids in formation, there must be a time lag between the major epoch…
Astrophysical models for the high-energy emission of blazars are reviewed. Blazars ejecting relativistic radio jets at small angles to the line-of-sight are the only type of active galactic nuclei (AGN) discovered above 100 MeV. The…
We report the identification of the optical counterpart to the transient ultraluminuos X-ray source in the blue dwarf galaxy UGC6456 (VII Zw 403). The source is highly variable in both the X-ray (more 100 times, 0.3-10 keV) and optical…
Galactic binary systems that contain a black hole candidate emit hard X-rays in their low luminosity mode. We show that this emission can be understood as due to the Compton scattering of photons from the companion star and/or the accretion…
We examined X-ray spectral and timing properties of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in nearby galaxies in XMM-Newton archival data. There appear to be three distinct classes of spectra. One class shows emission from hot, diffuse plasma.…
In the local Universe, integrated X-ray emission from high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) is dominated by the brightest ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) with luminosity >10^40 erg/s. Such rare objects probably also dominated the production…
The recent discovery, by the Chandra satellite, that jets of blazars are strong X-ray emitters at large scales (0.1-1 Mpc) bears support to the hypothesis that (also) on these scales the emitting plasma is moving at highly relativistic…
Motivated by the recent discoveries that six Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULXs) are powered by highly super-Eddington X-ray pulsars, we searched for additional pulsating ULX (PULX) candidates by identifying sources that exhibit long-term…
A list of questions regarding Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) and Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs) remain unanswered within the Fireball-cone and Magnetar explosive scenarios. A persistent, thin (less than micron-sr solid angle) precessing and spinning…