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Register a new userRadiative Feedback from high mass X-ray binaries on the formation of the first galaxies and early reionization
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Recent work suggests that the first generation of stars, the so-called Population III (Pop III), could have formed primarily in binaries or as members of small multiple systems. Here we investigate the impact of X-ray feedback from High-Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs) left behind in stellar binary systems after the primary forms a black hole (BH), accreting gas at a high rate from the companion, a process that is thought to be favored at the low metallicities characteristic of high-redshift gas. Thanks to their large mean free path, X-rays are capable of preionizing and preheating the gas in the intergalactic medium (IGM) and in haloes long before the reionization of the Universe is complete, and thus could have strongly affected the formation of subsequent generations of stars as well as reionization. We have carried out zoomed hydrodynamical cosmological simulations of minihaloes, accounting for the formation of Pop III stars and their collapse into BHs and HMXBs, and the associated radiation-hydrodynamic feedback from UV and X-ray photons. We find no strong net feedback from HMXBs on the simulated star formation history. On the other hand, the preheating of the IGM by HMXBs leads to a strong suppression of small-scale structures and significantly lowers the recombination rate in the IGM, thus yielding a net positive feedback on reionization. We further show that X-ray feedback from HMXBs can augment the ionizing feedback from the Pop III progenitor stars to suppress gas accretion onto the first BHs, limiting their growth into supermassive BHs. Finally, we show that X-ray ionization by HMXBs leaves distinct signatures in the properties of the high-redshift hydrogen that may be probed in upcoming observations of the redshifted 21cm spin-flip line.
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Massive stars at redshifts z > 6 are predicted to have played a pivotal role in cosmological reionization as luminous sources of ultra-violet (UV) photons. However, the remnants of these massive stars could be equally important as X-ray luminous (L_X 1e38 erg/s) high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). Because the absorption cross section of neutral hydrogen decreases sharply with photon energy (proportional to the inverse cube), X-rays can escape more freely than UV photons from the star-forming regions in which they are produced, allowing HMXBs to make a potentially significant contribution to the ionizing X-ray background during reionization. In this paper, we explore the ionizing power of HMXBs at redshifts z > 6 using a Monte Carlo model for a coeval stellar population of main sequence stars and HMXBs. Using the archetypal Galactic HMXB Cygnus X-1 as our template, we propose a composite HMXB spectral energy distribution consisting of black-body and power-law components, whose contributions depend on the accretion state of the system. We determine the time-dependent ionizing power of a combined population of UV-luminous stars and X-ray luminous HMXBs, and deduce fitting formulae for the boost in the populations ionizing power arising from HMXBs; these fits allow for simple implementation of HMXB feedback in numerical simulations. Based on this analysis, we estimate the contribution of high redshift HMXBs to the present-day soft X-ray background, and we show that it is a factor of ~100-1000 smaller than the observed limit. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for the role of HMXBs in reionization and in high redshift galaxy formation.
X-ray photons, because of their long mean-free paths, can easily escape the galactic environments where they are produced, and interact at long distances with the inter-galactic medium, potentially having a significant contribution to the heating and reionization of the early Universe. The two most important sources of X-ray photons in the Universe are active galactic nuclei (AGN) and X-ray binaries (XRBs). In this Letter we use results from detailed, large scale population synthesis simulations to study the energy feedback of XRBs, from the first galaxies (z~ 20) until today. We estimate that X-ray emission from XRBs dominates over AGN at z>6-8. The shape of the spectral energy distribution of the emission from XRBs shows little change with redshift, in contrast to its normalization which evolves by ~4 orders of magnitude, primarily due to the evolution of the cosmic star-formation rate. However, the metallicity and the mean stellar age of a given XRB population affect significantly its X-ray output. Specifically, the X-ray luminosity from high-mass XRBs per unit of star-formation rate varies an order of magnitude going from solar metallicity to less than 10% solar, and the X-ray luminosity from low-mass XRBs per unit of stellar mass peaks at an age of ~300 Myr and then decreases gradually at later times, showing little variation for mean stellar ages > 3 Gyr. Finally, we provide analytical and tabulated prescriptions for the energy output of XRBs, that can be directly incorporated in cosmological simulations.
Based on a homogeneous set of X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet observations from Chandra, Spitzer, GALEX and 2MASS archives, we study populations of high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) in a sample of 29 nearby star-forming galaxies and their relation with the star formation rate (SFR). In agreement with previous results, we find that HMXBs are a good tracer of the recent star formation activity in the host galaxy and their collective luminosity and number scale with the SFR, in particular, Lx~2.6 10^{39} SFR. However, the scaling relations still bear a rather large dispersion of ~0.4 dex, which we believe is of a physical origin. We present the catalog of 1057 X-ray sources detected within the $D25$ ellipse for galaxies of our sample and construct the average X-ray luminosity function (XLF) of HMXBs with substantially improved statistical accuracy and better control of systematic effects than achieved in previous studies. The XLF follows a power law with slope of 1.6 in the logLx~35-40 luminosity range with a moderately significant evidence for a break or cut-off at Lx~10^{40} erg/s. As before, we did not find any features at the Eddington limit for a neutron star or a stellar mass black hole. We discuss implications of our results for the theory of binary evolution. In particular we estimate the fraction of compact objects that once upon their lifetime experienced an X-ray active phase powered by accretion from a high mass companion and obtain a rather large number, fx~0.2 (0.1 Myr/tau_x) (tau_x is the life time of the X-ray active phase). This is ~4 orders of magnitude more frequent than in LMXBs. We also derive constrains on the mass distribution of the secondary star in HMXBs.
The aim of this review is to describe the nature, formation and evolution of the three kinds of high mass X-ray binary (HMXB) population: i. systems hosting Be stars (BeHMXBs), ii. systems accreting the stellar wind of supergiant stars (sgHMXBs), and iii. supergiant stars overflowing their Roche lobe. There are now many new observations, from the high-energy side (mainly from the INTEGRAL satellite), complemented by multi-wavelength observations (mainly in the optical, near and mid-infrared from ESO facilities), showing that a new population of supergiant HMXBs has been recently revealed. New observations also suggest the existence of evolutionary links between Be and stellar wind accreting supergiant X-ray binaries. I describe here the observational facts about the different categories of HMXBs, discuss the different models of accretion in these sources (e.g. transitory accretion disc versus clumpy winds), show the evidences of a link between different kinds of HMXBs, and finally compare observations with population synthesis models.
The high mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) provide an exciting framework to investigate the evolution of massive stars and the processes behind binary evolution. HMXBs have shown to be good tracers of recent star formation in galaxies and might be important feedback sources at early stages of the Universe. Furthermore, HMXBs are likely the progenitors of gravitational wave sources (BH--BH or BH--NS binaries that may merge producing gravitational waves). In this work, we investigate the nature and properties of HMXB population in star-forming galaxies. We combine the results from the population synthesis model MOBSE (Giacobbo et al. 2018) together with galaxy catalogs from EAGLE simulation (Schaye et al. 2015). Therefore, this method describes the HMXBs within their host galaxies in a self-consistent way. We compute the X-ray luminosity function (XLF) of HMXBs in star-forming galaxies, showing that this methodology matches the main features of the observed XLF.
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