2007/10/25 by R. Barnard, Barnard, R., L. Shaw Greening +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #History and Developments in Astronomy #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0710.4893
To appear in the proceedings of "X-rays from Nearby Galaxies", 4-7 Septembeer 2007, 4 pages
arxiv created 2007/10/25 · openalex publication_date 2007/10/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
There is a large body of work that has used the excellent Chandra observations of nearby galaxies with neglible low mass X-ray binary (LMXB) populations. This has culminated in a ``Universal'' X-ray luminosity function (XLF) for high mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). However, a number of methods have been used to convert from source intensities to luminosities when creating these XLFs. We have taken advantage of the XMM-Newton observations of the nearby starbursting spiral galaxy NGC 253 to test some of these methods. We find the luminosities derived from these various methods to vary by a factor of ∼3. We also find the most influential factor in the conversion from intensity to luminosity to be the absorption. We therefore conclude that a more consistent approach is required for determining the true Universal XLF for HMXBs. Ideally, this would involve individual spectral fitting of each X-ray source. Certainly, the line-of-sight absorption should be determined from the observations rather than assuming Galactic absorption. We find the best approach for obtaining an XLF from low-count data to be the splitting of the X-ray sources into two or more intensity intervals, and obtaining a conversion from intensity to flux for each group from spectral modelling of the summed spectrum of that group.