X-ray sources in Galactic globular clusters and old open clusters

Abstract

The features and make up of the population of X-ray sources in Galactic star clusters reflect the properties of the underlying stellar environment. Cluster age, mass, stellar encounter rate, binary frequency, metallicity, and maybe other properties as well, determine to what extent we can expect a contribution to the cluster X-ray emission from low-mass X-ray binaries, millisecond pulsars, cataclysmic variables, and magnetically active binaries. Sensitive X-ray observations with XMM-Newton and certainly Chandra have yielded new insights into the nature of individual sources and the effects of dynamical encounters. They have also provided a new perspective on the collective X-ray properties of clusters, in which the X-ray emissivities of globular clusters and old open clusters can be compared to each other and to those of other environments. I will review our current understanding of cluster X-ray sources, focusing on star clusters older than about 1 Gyr, illustrated with recent results.

10 pages, to appear in the proceedings of IAU Symposium 351, "Star Clusters: From the Milky Way to the Early Universe", 2019

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Formation and Evolution of Accreting Compact Objects
• Unresolved multiple stars and Galactic clusters' mass estimates
• Exotica in the Globular Cluster M4, Studied with Chandra, HST, and the VLA
• Introducing a new multi-particle collision method for the evolution of dense stellar systems. Crash-test N-body simulations