| Literature DB >> 28219970 |
Gian Luca Israel1, Andrea Belfiore2, Luigi Stella3, Paolo Esposito4,2, Piergiorgio Casella3, Andrea De Luca2,5, Martino Marelli2, Alessandro Papitto3, Matteo Perri6,3, Simonetta Puccetti6,3, Guillermo A Rodríguez Castillo3, David Salvetti2, Andrea Tiengo7,2,5, Luca Zampieri8, Daniele D'Agostino9, Jochen Greiner10, Frank Haberl10, Giovanni Novara7,2, Ruben Salvaterra2, Roberto Turolla11, Mike Watson12, Joern Wilms13, Anna Wolter14.
Abstract
Ultraluminous x-ray sources (ULXs) in nearby galaxies shine brighter than any x-ray source in our Galaxy. ULXs are usually modeled as stellar-mass black holes (BHs) accreting at very high rates or intermediate-mass BHs. We present observations showing that NGC 5907 ULX is instead an x-ray accreting neutron star (NS) with a spin period evolving from 1.43 seconds in 2003 to 1.13 seconds in 2014. It has an isotropic peak luminosity of [Formula: see text]1000 times the Eddington limit for a NS at 17.1 megaparsec. Standard accretion models fail to explain its luminosity, even assuming beamed emission, but a strong multipolar magnetic field can describe its properties. These findings suggest that other extreme ULXs (x-ray luminosity [Formula: see text] 1041 erg second[Formula: see text]) might harbor NSs.Entities:
Year: 2017 PMID： 28219970 DOI： 10.1126/science.aai8635
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Science ISSN： 0036-8075 Impact factor: 47.728