Catalogue of ULX's line features Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Kosec P.
  2. Pinto C.
  3. Reynolds C.S.
  4. Guainazzi M.
  5. Kara E.
  6. Walton D.J.,Fabian A.C.
  7. Parker M.L.
  8. Valtchanov I.
  9. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Most ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are thought to be powered by super- Eddington accretion on to stellar-mass compact objects. Accretors in this extreme regime are naturally expected to ionize copious amounts of plasma in their vicinity and launch powerful radiation-driven outflows from their discs. High spectral resolution X-ray observations [with reflection grating spectrometer (RGS) gratings onboard XMM-Newton] of a few ULXs with the best data sets indeed found complex line spectra and confirmed such extreme (0.1-0.3c) winds. However, a search for plasma signatures in a large ULX sample with a rigorous technique has never been performed, thereby preventing us from understanding their statistical properties such as the rate of occurrence, to constrain the outflow geometry, and its duty cycle. We developed a fast method for automated line detection in X-ray spectra and applied it to the full RGS ULX archive, rigorously quantifying the statistical significance of any candidate lines. Collecting the 135 most significant features detected in 89 observations of 19 objects, we created the first catalogue of spectral lines detected in soft X-ray ULX spectra. We found that the detected emission lines are concentrated around known rest-frame elemental transitions and thus originate from low- velocity material. The absorption lines instead avoid these transitions, suggesting they were imprinted by blueshifted outflows. Such winds therefore appear common among the ULX population. Additionally, we found that spectrally hard ULXs show fewer line detections than soft ULXs, indicating some difference in their accretion geometry and orientation, possibly causing overionization of plasma by the harder spectral energy distributions of harder ULXs.

Keywords
  1. x-ray-sources
  2. accretion
  3. black-holes
  4. neutron-stars
  5. spectroscopy
  6. spectral-energy-distribution
  7. line-intensities
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2021MNRAS.508.3569K
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/508/3569
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/508/3569

Access

Web browser access HTML
http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/508/3569
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/508/3569
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/508/3569
IVOA Table Access TAP
http://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).
IVOA Cone Search SCS
For use with a cone search client (e.g., TOPCAT).
http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/conesearch/J/MNRAS/508/3569/source?
https://vizier.iucaa.in/viz-bin/conesearch/J/MNRAS/508/3569/source?
http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/conesearch/J/MNRAS/508/3569/source?

History

2024-09-16T16:11:42Z
Resource record created
2024-09-16T16:11:42Z
Created
2024-09-20T13:12:17Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr