Ultraluminous X-Ray Sources

By P. Kaaret, H. Feng, T. Roberts. 2017

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We review observations of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). X-ray spectroscopic and timing studies of ULXs suggest a new accretion state distinct from those seen in Galactic stellar-mass black hole binaries. The detection of coherent pulsations indicates the presence of neutron-star accretors in three ULXs and therefore apparently super-Eddington luminosities. Optical and X-ray line profiles of ULXs and the properties of associated radio and optical nebulae suggest that ULXs produce powerful outflows, also indicative of super-Eddington accretion. We discuss models of super-Eddington accretion and their relationship to the observed behaviors of ULXs. We review the evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in ULXs. We consider the implications of ULXs for super-Eddington accretion in active galactic nuclei, heating of the early Universe, and the origin of the black hole binary recently detected via gravitational waves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a621a44b6f2263c82272fbd8e8b6e40b63c2834e

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Citations in the corpus

Discovery of pulsations from NGC 300 ULX1 and its fast period evolution (2018, background): “Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs; for a review see Kaaret et al. 2017) are off-nuclear point-like X-ray sources exceeding the (isotropic) Eddington limit for a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole, which is 1.3 × 1038(M/M ) erg s−1.”