Monday, July 1, 2013

1306.6861 (N. La Palombara et al.)

Observations of the unique X-ray emitting subdwarf stars HD49798 and BD+37 442    [PDF]

N. La Palombara, S. Mereghetti, A. Tiengo, P. Esposito, L. Stella, G. L. Israel
We report on the results we obtained with XMM-Newton observations of HD49798 and BD+37 442, the only two sdO stars for which X-ray emission has been observed so far. HD is a single-lined spectroscopic binary with orbital period of 1.5 days. We could establish that its companion is a massive white dwarf with M = 1.28 Msun, which makes it a candidate type Ia supernova progenitor; we also detected a significant X-ray emission during the white-dwarf eclipse, which could be X-ray emission of the sdO star itself. In the case of BD+37 442, a luminous He-rich sdO that up to now was believed to be a single star, we discovered soft X-ray emission with a periodicity of 19.2 s. This indicates that also this hot subdwarf has a compact binary companion, either a white dwarf or a neutron star, most likely powered by accretion from the wind of the sdO star.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6861

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