Pulsars, transients and relativistic astrophysics

Abstract:

We describe the motivation, design, and implementation of the CORNISH survey, an arcsecondresolution radio continuum survey of the inner galactic plane at 5 GHz using the Very Large Array (VLA). It is a blind survey coordinated with the northern Spitzer GLIMPSE I region covering 10° < l < 65° and |b| < 1° at similar resolution. We discuss in detail the strategy that we employed to control the shape of the synthesised beam across this survey, which covers a wide range of fairly low declinations. Two snapshots separated by 4h kept the beam elongation to less that 1.5 over 75% of the survey area and less than 2 over 98% of the survey. The prime scientific motivation is to provide an unbiased survey for ultra-compact H II regions to study this key phase in massive star formation. A sensitivity around 2 mJy will allow the automatic distinction between radio-loud and radio-quiet mid- IR sources found in the Spitzer surveys. This survey has many legacy applications beyond star formation, including evolved stars, active stars and binaries, and extragalactic sources. The CORNISH survey for compact ionized sources complements other Galactic plane surveys that target diffuse and nonthermal sources, as well as atomic and molecular phases to build up a complete picture of the interstellar medium in the Galaxy. © 2012. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Abstract:

We revisit a core prediction of the disc instability model (DIM) applied to X-ray binaries. The model predicts the existence of a critical mass-transfer rate, which depends on disc size, separating transient and persistent systems. We therefore selected a sample of 52 persistent and transient neutron star and black hole X-ray binaries and verified if the observed persistent (transient) systems do lie in the appropriate stable (unstable) region of parameter space predicted by the model. We find that, despite the significant uncertainties inherent to these kinds of studies, the data are in very good agreement with the theoretical expectations. We then discuss some individual cases that do not clearly fit into this main conclusion. Finally, we introduce the transientness parameter as a measure of the activity of a source and show a clear trend of the average outburst recurrence time to decrease with transientness in agreement with the DIM predictions. We therefore conclude that, despite difficulties in reproducing the complex details of the light curves, the DIM succeeds in explaining the global behaviour of X-ray binaries averaged over a long enough period of time. © 2012 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS.