Diagnostics of Neutron Star and Black Hole XRay Binaries with XRay Shot Widths.pdfVIP

DIAGNOSTICS OF NEUTRON STAR AND BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES WITH X-RAY SHOT WIDTHS 1 2,3 2,4,3,5 Hua Feng , T. P. Li , and S. N. Zhang ABSTRACT 4 0 0 2 A statistic w , the differential coefficient of the mean absolute difference of n an observed lightcurve, is proposed for timescale analysis of shot widths. The a J shortest width of random shots can be measured by the position of the lower 2 cut-off in the timescale spectrum of w . We use the statistic to analyze X-ray 1 lightcurves from a sample of neutron star and black hole binaries and the results 1 show that the timescale analysis can help us distinguish between neutron star v 5 binaries and black hole binaries. The analysis can further reveal the structure 0 and dynamics of accretion disks around black holes. 2 1 0 4 Subject headings: methods: data analysis — stars: neutron — black hole physics 0 — X-rays: binaries — X-rays: stars / h p - o r 1. Introduction t s a : Complex X-ray emission variability at wide timescales has been observed in accreting v i stellar mass black hole candidate (BHC) and weakly magnetized neutron stars (NS) systems X (for reviews see Tanaka Lewin 1995; van der Klis 1995). On the subsecond timescale, r a aperiodic fluctuations are common in these systems, as first discovered by Oda et al. (1971) in the prototype BHC Cyg X-1 in its hard state with a large amplitude (up to ∼ 40% rms of