TY - JOUR
T1 - Accretion Disks and Coronae in the X-Ray Flashlight
AU - Degenaar, Nathalie
AU - Ballantyne, David R.
AU - Belloni, Tomaso
AU - Chakraborty, Manoneeta
AU - Chen, Yu Peng
AU - Ji, Long
AU - Kretschmar, Peter
AU - Kuulkers, Erik
AU - Li, Jian
AU - Maccarone, Thomas J.
AU - Malzac, Julien
AU - Zhang, Shu
AU - Zhang, Shuang Nan
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the International Space Sciences Institute in Beijing for hosting the meetings that initiated the writing of this review. We are most grateful to Jean in ’t Zand, Wenfei Yu, and Philippe Peille for kindly providing plots from their publications for use in this review, and to Duncan Galloway, Jean in ’t Zand and Valery Suleimanov for providing valuable comments on a draft version of the manuscript. We thank James Miller-Jones and Andrzej Zdziarski for useful discussions. We thank the anonymous referee for constructive comments that helped improve this manuscript. ND is supported by a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and a Marie Curie Intra-European fellowship from the European Commission under contract no. FP-PEOPLE-2013-IEF-627148. TMB acknowledges financial contribution from the agreement ASI-INAF I/037/12/0. JM acknowledges financial support from the French National Research Agency (CHAOS project ANR-12-BS05-0009). ZSN, ZS and CYP thank support from XTP project XDA 04060604, the Strategic Priority Research Program “The Emergence of Cosmological Structures” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, grant no XDB09000000, the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0400800) and the Chinese NSFC 11473027, 11733009.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, The Author(s).
PY - 2018/2/1
Y1 - 2018/2/1
N2 - Plasma accreted onto the surface of a neutron star can ignite due to unstable thermonuclear burning and produce a bright flash of X-ray emission called a Type-I X-ray burst. Such events are very common; thousands have been observed to date from over a hundred accreting neutron stars. The intense, often Eddington-limited, radiation generated in these thermonuclear explosions can have a discernible effect on the surrounding accretion flow that consists of an accretion disk and a hot electron corona. Type-I X-ray bursts can therefore serve as direct, repeating probes of the internal dynamics of the accretion process. In this work we review and interpret the observational evidence for the impact that Type-I X-ray bursts have on accretion disks and coronae. We also provide an outlook of how to make further progress in this research field with prospective experiments and analysis techniques, and by exploiting the technical capabilities of the new and concept X-ray missions ASTROSAT, NICER, Insight-HXMT, eXTP, and STROBE-X.
AB - Plasma accreted onto the surface of a neutron star can ignite due to unstable thermonuclear burning and produce a bright flash of X-ray emission called a Type-I X-ray burst. Such events are very common; thousands have been observed to date from over a hundred accreting neutron stars. The intense, often Eddington-limited, radiation generated in these thermonuclear explosions can have a discernible effect on the surrounding accretion flow that consists of an accretion disk and a hot electron corona. Type-I X-ray bursts can therefore serve as direct, repeating probes of the internal dynamics of the accretion process. In this work we review and interpret the observational evidence for the impact that Type-I X-ray bursts have on accretion disks and coronae. We also provide an outlook of how to make further progress in this research field with prospective experiments and analysis techniques, and by exploiting the technical capabilities of the new and concept X-ray missions ASTROSAT, NICER, Insight-HXMT, eXTP, and STROBE-X.
KW - Accretion, accretion disks
KW - Stars: coronae
KW - Stars: jets
KW - Stars: neutron
KW - X-rays: binaries
KW - X-rays: bursts
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85037362181&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11214-017-0448-3
DO - 10.1007/s11214-017-0448-3
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85037362181
VL - 214
JO - Space Science Reviews
JF - Space Science Reviews
SN - 0038-6308
IS - 1
M1 - 15
ER -