Latest Soft X-ray transient Stories
WASHINGTON, Oct. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen,"...
[ Watch the Video: X-ray Nova Reveals a New Black Hole in Our Galaxy ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new stellar-mass black hole has been discovered in our galaxy by NASA's Swift satellite. High-energy X-rays emanating from a source towards the center of our Milky Way galaxy were observed, indicating the presence of a previously unknown black hole. "Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they're essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one...
Studies of one of the galaxy's most active black-hole binaries reveal a dramatic change that will help scientists better understand how these systems expel fast-moving particle jets.Binary systems where a normal star is paired with a black hole often produce large swings in X-ray emission and blast jets of gas at speeds exceeding one-third that of light. What fuels this activity is gas pulled from the normal star, which spirals toward the black hole and piles up in a dense accretion...
ESA's X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has revealed a new class of exploding stars "“ where the X-ray emission "˜lives fast and dies young'.The identification of this particular class of explosions gives astronomers a valuable new constraint to help them model and understand stellar explosions. Exploding stars called novae remain a puzzle to astronomers. "Modelling these outbursts is very difficult," says Wolfgang Pietsch of the Max Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik. Now, ESA's...
ESA -- ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has discovered a new, highly populated class of X-ray fast 'transient' binary stars, undetected in previous observations. With this discovery, Integral confirms how much it is contributing to revealing a whole hidden Universe. The new class of double star systems is characterised by a very compact object that produces highly energetic, recurrent and fast-growing X-ray outbursts, and a very luminous 'supergiant' companion. The compact object can...
Latest Soft X-ray transient Reference Libraries
X-ray Binaries -- X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are very luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component (usually a relatively normal star) to the other component, which is a neutron star or a black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tens of per cent of its rest mass as X-rays. (Hydrogen fusion releases about 0.7 per cent of rest mass) X-ray binaries are further subdivided into...
