Ultraluminous X-ray sources: three exciting years

Abstract

The extreme extragalactic sources known as Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULX) represent a unique testing environment for compact objects population studies and the accretion process. Their nature has long been disputed. Their luminosity, well above the Eddington luminosity for a stellar-mass black hole, can imply the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole or a stellar black hole accreting above the Eddington limit. Both these interpretations are important to understand better the accretion process and the evolution of massive black holes. The last few years have seen a dramatic improvement of our knowledge of these sources. In particular, the super-Eddington interpretation for the bulk of the ULX population has gained a strong consensus. Nonetheless, exceptions to this general trend do exist, and in particular one ULX was shown to be a neutron star, and another was shown to be a very likely IMBH candidate. In this paper, I will review the progress done in the last few years.

6 pages, 3 figures. Proceedings from the 2015 XMM-Newton Science Workshop, Astronomical Notes, in press

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Discovery of a 0.42-s pulsar in the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 7793 P13
• Feedback by Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies
• ULX spectra revisited: Accreting, highly magnetized neutron stars as the engines of ultraluminous X-ray sources
• Spectra of Black Hole Accretion Models of Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources
• Neutral gas heating by X-rays in primitive galaxies: Infrared observations of IZw18 with Herschel
• Non-Equilibrium Chemistry and Destruction of CO by X-ray Flares
• Outbursts of the intermediate-mass black hole HLX-1: a wind instability scenario
• Ultraluminous X-ray sources with flat-topped noise and QPO
• Limits on Runaway Growth of Intermediate Mass Black Holes from Advanced LIGO
• Discovery of a transient ultraluminous X-ray source in the elliptical galaxy M86
• Supercritical colliding wind binaries
• Polarisation Leakage due to Errors in Track Reconstruction in Gas Pixel Detectors
• On the Statistical Properties of Cospectra
• An expanded ultraluminous X-ray source catalogue