X-ray Monitoring of Black Hole and Neutron Star Transients

The brightest X-ray sources in the sky to the earth observer are X-ray binaries in our Galaxy. The first X-ray source discovered in the sky is Scopius X-1, which led to the birth of X-ray astronomy in the 1960s and have been the brightest source in the sky. As we now known, most of the X-ray binaries are transients. For example, there are only a few persistent black hole X-ray binaries. Observations of these X-ray binaries have brought a lot progress in high energy astrophysics, from the discovery of stellar mass black holes and neutron stars to exotic objects such as magnetars. One of the most important achievements in high energy astrophysics is black hole and neutron star accretion. Because most of the radiation of accreting black holes and neutron stars are in the X-rays, observations of accreting black holes and neutron stars have largely shaped the current theory of black hole accretion. Most of these systems, including both persistent sources such as Cygnus X-1 and GRS 1915+105 and transient sources such as V404 cyg or GX 339-4, are actually called microquasars, because they can launch relativistic jets, similar to those quasars which contain supermassive black holes.

The investigations of the X-ray timporal and spectral properties and multi-wavelength behaviors of these accreting black holes and neutron stars usually need all-sky X-ray monitors to monitor persistent and transient sources, since we have to observe these sources in the right accretion regimes (at the right time) to investigate relevant accretion-jet physics.

We make use of space observatories such as Swift and XMM-Newton to study the X-ray spectra at the early phase of TDFs. In the future, we look forward to future X-ray timing/spectral missions: eXTP, LOFT and several other X-ray telescopes.

Here below are the reviews/papers about the field:

Representative Publications:

[ version last updated: 2017.10.10 wenfei @shao.ac.cn ]