Investigating High Mass X-ray Binaries at hard X-rays with INTEGRAL [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01882


The INTEGRAL archive developed at INAF-IASF Milano with the available public observations from late 2002 to 2016 is investigated to extract the X-ray properties of 58 High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs). This sample consists of sources hosting either a Be star (Be/XRBs) or an early-type supergiant companion (SgHMXBs), including the Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs). INTEGRAL light curves (sampled at 2 ks) are used to build their hard X-ray luminosity distributions, returning the source duty cycles, the range of variability of the X-ray luminosity and the time spent in each luminosity state. The phenomenology observed with INTEGRAL, together with the source variability at soft X-rays taken from the literature, allows us to obtain a quantitative overview of the main sub-classes of massive binaries in accretion (Be/XRBs, SgHMXBs and SFXTs). Although some criteria can be derived to distinguish them, some SgHMXBs exist with intermediate properties, bridging together persistent SgHMXBs and SFXTs.

Read this paper on arXiv…

L. Sidoli and A. Paizis
Tue, 8 Jan 19
30/99

Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures; to appear in IAU Symposium 346 “High-mass X-ray binaries: illuminating the passage from massive binaries to merging compact objects”, 2018 August 27-31, Vienna, Austria