Photospheric radius expansion X-ray bursts as standard candles

By E. Kuulkers, P. Hartog, J. I. Zand, F. Verbunt, W. Harris, M. C. S. Research, Utrecht University, M. University, I. D. F. Cosmica. 2002

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined the maximum bolometric peak luminosities during type I X-ray bursts from the persistent or transient luminous X-ray sources in globular clusters. We show that for about two thirds of the sources the maximum peak luminosities during photospheric radius expansion X-ray bursts extend to a critical value of 3:790:1510 38 erg s 1 , assuming the total X-ray burst emission is entirely due to black-body radiation and the recorded maximum luminosity is the actual peak luminosity. This empirical critical luminosity is consistent with the Eddington luminosity limit for hydrogen poor material. Since the critical luminosity is more or less always reached during photospheric radius expansion X-ray bursts (except for one source), such bursts may be regarded as empirical standard candles. However, because significant deviations do occur, our standard candle is only accurate to within 15%. We re-evaluated the distances to the twelve globular clusters in which the X-ray bursters reside.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48fef516959c53687edf89b363deb2ff3791f869

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Heinke
2. Robert P. Fender
3. Peter G. Jonker
4. J. Lattimer
5. F. Özel
6. S. Guillot
7. T. Güver
8. P. Wroblewski

Citations in the corpus

• THE EQUATION OF STATE FROM OBSERVED MASSES AND RADII OF NEUTRON STARS (2010, unknown): “Güver et al. (2010b) uses a boxcar distribution from 6.8 kpc to 9.6 kpc, to reflect two distance measurements of (7.6± 0.4) kpc (Kuulkers et al. 2003) and (8.4± 0.6) kpc (Valenti et al. 2007).”
• Jets in neutron star X-ray binaries: a comparison with black holes (2005, background): “(1998) and the distance in Kuulkers et al. (2003) and references therein.”
• THE DENSE MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FROM NEUTRON STAR RADIUS AND MASS MEASUREMENTS (2015, methodology): “Two optical and one near-IR studies give consistent and well-constrained distances to NGC 6440: Kuulkers et al. (2003) reported 8.4+1.5−1.3 kpc, Harris et al. (2010) found 8.5 kpc, while Valenti et al. (2007) found 8.2± 0.6 kpc using near-IR data.”
• Six new candidate ultracompact X-ray binaries (2007, methodology): “This system shows regular bursts with an average recurrence time of 2.5 d according to the BeppoSAX-WFC data archive which contains 24 burst detections (Cocchi et al. 2000b; Kuulkers et al. 2003).”
• Neutron star mass and radius measurements from atmospheric model fits to X-ray burst cooling tail spectra (2017, unknown): “…background flux is often estimated by observations prior to or after the burst, but observational (Yu et al. 1999; van Paradijs & Lewin 1986; Kuulkers et al. 2003; Chen et al. 2011; in’t Zand et al. 2011; Serino et al. 2012; Degenaar et al. 2013; Worpel et al. 2013; Peille et al. 2014;…”
• The distances to Galactic low-mass X-ray binaries: consequences for black hole luminosities and kicks (2004, methodology): “If we take a 1:4 ratio as was found by Kuulkers et al. 2003 this would affect 8 systems in our sample.”
• Detecting gravitational wave emission from the known accreting neutron stars (2008, background): “The distance estimated from X-ray bursts is ≈ 6.6 kpc (Vacca, Lewin & van Paradijs 1986; Kuulkers et al. 2003).”
• THE MASS AND RADIUS OF THE NEUTRON STAR IN 4U 1820−30 (2010, background): “Previous studies have yielded two different distance measurements for the globular clus- ter NGC 6624, 7.6 ± 0.4 kpc from optical (Kuulkers et al. 2003) and 8.4 ± 0.6 kpc from near-IR observations (Valenti et al. 2007).”
• Do X-ray binary spectral state transition luminosities vary? (2003, background): “…distances measured from Type I bursts have systematic biases of up to 50%, depending, for example on whether the accreted material is hydrogen rich or hydrogen poor, and on whether the truly “brightest” radius-expansion burst from a particular system has been observed (see Kuulkers et al. 2003).”