Related papers: Tomography of Polars
Cataclysmic Variables (CVs) are a distinct class of X-ray binaries transferring mass from a donor star to a compact star accretor, a white dwarf. They constitute a laboratory for accretion physics, mechanisms and disk theory together with…
The Doppler technique measures the reflex radial motion of a star induced by the presence of companions and is the most successful method to detect exoplanets. If several planets are present, their signals will appear combined in the radial…
Mueller polarimetry involves a variety of instruments and technologies whose importance and scope of applications are rapidly increasing. The exploitation of these powerful resources depends strongly on the mathematical models that underlie…
Polarized neutrons are a powerful probe to investigate magnetism in condensed matter on length scales from single atomic distances to micrometers. With the ongoing advancement of neutron optics, that allow to transport beams with increased…
We present multi-epoch spectroscopy of "heartbeat stars," eccentric binaries with dynamic tidal distortions and tidally induced pulsations originally discovered with the Kepler satellite. Optical spectra of six known heartbeat stars using…
Pulsars are considered to be the leading explanation for the excess in cosmic-ray positrons detected by PAMELA and AMS-02. A notable feature of standard pulsar models is the sharp spectral cutoff produced by the increasingly efficient…
We review the properties of 40 X-ray binaries that contain either a confirmed black hole or a black hole candidate. After discussing briefly the significance of these Galactic black holes to both astronomy and physics, we present basic data…
The masses of stars and planets can be measured dynamically in binary systems. For an unresolved binary, time series astrometry yields some orbital parameters, but it cannot provide the component masses, because we observe only the motion…
Microlensing is one of the most promising tools for discovering stellar-mass black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way because it allows us to probe dark or faint celestial compact objects. While the existence of stellar-mass BHs has been…
Coalescing compact binaries with neutron star or black hole components provide the most promising sources of gravitational radiation for detection by the LIGO/VIRGO/GEO/TAMA laser interferometers now under construction. This fact has…
X-ray polarimetry promises to give new information about high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts. We designed, built and tested a hard X-ray…
The secondary, Roche-lobe filling stars in cataclysmic variables (CVs) are key to our understanding of the origin, evolution and behaviour of this class of interacting binary. We review the basic properties of the secondary stars in CVs and…
Binary systems containing at least one radiopulsar are excellent laboratories to test several aspects of fundamental physics like matter properties in conditions of extreme density and theories of gravitation like the Einstein's General…
Using the StarTrack population synthesis code we compute the distribution of masses of merging compact object (black hole or neutron star) binaries. The shape of the mass distribution is sensitive to some of the parameters governing the…
The Doppler beaming effect, induced by the reflex motion of stars, introduces flux modulations and serves as an efficient method to photometrically determine mass functions for a large number of close binary systems, particularly those…
Radial velocity studies of accreting binary stars commonly use accretion disk emission lines to determine the radial velocity of the primary star and therefore the mass ratio. These emission line radial velocity curves are often shifted in…
The shapelets method for image analysis is based upon the decomposition of localised objects into a series of orthogonal components with convenient mathematical properties. We extend the "Cartesian shapelet" formalism from earlier work, and…
The determination of fundamental parameters in X-ray luminous (persistent) X-ray binaries has been classically hampered by the large optical luminosity of the accretion disc. New methods, based on irradiation of the donor star and burst…
Polarization is one of the fundamental natures of electromagnetic radiation. The detection of polarization or polarized photons from distant X-ray radiating systems (such as X-ray binaries (XBs), active galactic nuclei (AGN), pulsars, and…
Binary star systems can accrete material originating from a circumbinary disc. Since it is common for the circumbinary disc to be tilted with respect to the binary orbital plane, we test whether the accretion dynamics can be a diagnostic…