Variability as a tool to study accreting black holes and neutron stars

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• Simon Vaughan (Leicester)
• Thursday 07 May 2015, 15:00-16:00
• Physics West 117.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ilya Mandel.

The fluctuating brightness of cosmic X-ray sources, particularly accreting black holes and neutron star systems, has enabled enormous progress in understanding the physics of turbulent accretion flows, the behaviour of matter on the surfaces of neutron stars and improving the evidence for black holes. Most of this progress has been made by analysing and modelling time series data in terms of their power- and cross-spectra.

In this talk I am going to concentrate on a related but often overlooked aspect of their variability: the rms-flux relation. I will illustrate the basic idea and its consequences using examples of X-ray variability from X-ray binaries, Ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in nearby galaxies, and AGN , including Kepler optical monitoring of a Blazar.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Astrophysics Seminars
• Bham Talks
• Physics West 117
• What's on in Physics?

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