Optical emission from massive donors in ULX binary systems

Abstract

We present evolutionary tracks of binary systems with high mass companion stars and stellar-through-intermediate mass BHs. Using Eggleton's stellar evolution code, we compute the luminosity produced by accretion from the donor during its entire evolution. We compute also the evolution of the optical spectrum of the binary system taking the disc contribution and irradiation effects into account. The calculations presented here can be used to constrain the properties of the donor stars in Ultraluminous X-ray Sources by comparing their position on the HR or color-magnitude diagrams with the evolutionary tracks of massive BH binaries. This approach may actually provide interesting clues also on the properties of the binary system itself, including the BH mass. We found that, on the basis of their position on the color-magnitude diagram, some of the candidate counterparts considered can be ruled out and more stringent constraints can be applied to the donor masses.

11 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (5)

• XMM-Newton observations of the brightest Ultraluminous X-ray sources
• Spectral State Transitions of the Ultraluminous X-ray Sources X-1 and X-2 in NGC 1313
• On the weakness of disc models in bright ULXs
• Irradiation models for ULXs and fits to optical data
• Photon Bubbles and the Vertical Structure of Accretion Disks

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 1313 X-2 - Its optical counterpart and environment
• New Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the counterparts to six ultraluminous X-ray sources
• Detection of X-ray elongated emission from a ultraluminous X-ray source in the interacting pair of galaxies NGC 5953/5954