What is the nature of the high energy X-ray sources in the galaxy?
Abstract
Finding sources of high energy “hard” X-rays allow us to probe the most extreme conditions in the Universe. Such sources include accreting black holes and neutron stars, where we find the strongest gravitational and magnetic fields, as well as pulsars and supernova remnants, where particles are accelerated to produce the hard X-rays. Over the past decade, the INTEGRAL satellite ahs been discovering new high energy sources, and this has allowed us to understand the population of bright hard X-ray sources. Over the past few years, the NuSTAR satellite, with much better sensitivity than INTEGRAL, has been allowing us to find even more hard X-ray sources, and we will present results from studies of sources discovered in the NuSTAR serendipitous source survey. We analyzed seven different potential sources looking for counterparts using NuSTAR, Chandra and ground based optical/NIR observations. Of the seven, two have confirmed counterparts and five need either an optical/NIR detection or further spectroscopy.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #229
- Pub Date:
- January 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AAS...22924715C