WATCHDOG: A COMPREHENSIVE ALL-SKY DATABASE OF GALACTIC BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES
By B. Tetarenko, G. Sivakoff, C. Heinke, J. Gladstone. 2015
233 citations recorded by the source corpus.
With the advent of more sensitive all-sky instruments, the transient universe is being probed in greater depth than ever before. Taking advantage of available resources, we have established a comprehensive database of black hole (and black hole candidate) X-ray binary (BHXB) activity between 1996 and 2015 as revealed by all-sky instruments, scanning surveys, and select narrow-field X-ray instruments on board the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, Monitor of All-Sky X-ray Image, Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and Swift telescopes; the Whole-sky Alberta Time-resolved Comprehensive black-Hole Database Of the Galaxy or WATCHDOG. Over the past two decades, we have detected 132 transient outbursts, tracked and classified behavior occurring in 47 transient and 10 persistently accreting BHs, and performed a statistical study on a number of outburst properties across the Galactic population. We find that outbursts undergone by BHXBs that do not reach the thermally dominant accretion state make up a substantial fraction (∼40%) of the Galactic transient BHXB outburst sample over the past ∼20 years. Our findings suggest that this “hard-only” behavior, observed in transient and persistently accreting BHXBs, is neither a rare nor recent phenomenon and may be indicative of an underlying physical process, relatively common among binary BHs, involving the mass-transfer rate onto the BH remaining at a low level rather than increasing as the outburst evolves. We discuss how the larger number of these “hard-only” outbursts and detected outbursts in general have significant implications for both the luminosity function and mass-transfer history of the Galactic BHXB population.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbf6565a0a4ae170782d2755f175f2d171fb9b0f
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “At wavelengths other than optical, X-ray transient surveys reveal a range of binary interaction activities, primarily in high-mass X-ray binaries with black hole (e.g., Tetarenko et al., 2016) or neutron star (e.g., Bozzo, Falanga, & Stella, 2008) accretors.”
- A review of quasi-periodic oscillations from black hole X-ray binaries: Observation and theory (2019, background): “However, in some of these cases the QPO may have been smeared out by very long exposures, and in others the QPO may simply have been missed due to the only outburst being ‘hard state only’ [222] or largely obstructed by sun constraints (e.”