X-ray emission from star-forming galaxies - I. High-mass X-ray binaries
Abstract
Based on a homogeneous set of X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet observations from Chandra, Spitzer, GALEX and 2MASS archives, we study populations of high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) in a sample of 29 nearby star-forming galaxies and their relation to the starformation rate (SFR).In agreement with previous results, we find that HMXBs are a good tracer of the recent star-formation activity in the host galaxy and their collective luminosity and number scale with the SFR: in particular, L X ≈ 2.6 × 10 39 × SFR.However, the scaling relations still bear a rather large dispersion of rms ∼ 0.4 dex, which we believe is of a physical origin.We present the catalogue of 1055 X-ray sources detected within the D25 ellipse for galaxies of our sample and construct the average X-ray luminosity function (XLF) of HMXBs with substantially improved statistical accuracy and better control of systematic effects than achieved in previous studies.The XLF follows a power law with a slope of 1.6 in the log (L X ) ∼ 35-40 luminosity range with moderately significant evidence for a break or cut-off at L X ∼ 10 40 erg s -1 .As before, we did not find any features at the Eddington limit for a neutron star or a stellar-mass black hole.We discuss the implications of our results for the theory of binary evolution.In particular we estimate the fraction of compact objects that once in their lifetime experienced an X-ray active phase powered by accretion from a high-mass companion and obtain a rather large…
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