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Luminous Supersoft X-ray Sources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2016

S. Rappaport  and
R. Di Stefano
S. Rappaport
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Center for Space Research MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.
R. Di Stefano
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.

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Supersoft X-ray sources exhibit spectra that are remarkably steep, in that the ratio of low-to-high energy X rays is much larger than is characteristic of the spectra associated with the previously known classes of luminous X-ray sources. The first supersoft sources were discovered during a survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud with the EINSTEIN Observatory (Long et al. 1981). The all-sky X-ray survey carried out with ROSAT has now established that luminous supersoft X-ray sources constitute a distinct astronomical class (see, e.g., Hasinger 1994). A number of the identified optical counterparts of the supersoft X-ray sources exhibit blue continua with emission lines of H and He II (Smale et al. 1988; Pakull et al. 1988; Cowley et al. 1990), which are characteristic of accretion disks. The X-ray emission of some sources is steady, while others exhibit significant time variability. Table 1 briefly summarizes what is known thus far about the numbers and characteristics of supersoft X-ray sources (see Hasinger 1994, and references therein).

Type
7 Cataclysmic Variables
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 165: Compact Stars in Binaries , 1996 , pp. 415 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1996 

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