Ultraluminous X-Ray Sources

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) were identified as a separate class of objects in 2000 based on data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. These are unique objects: their X-ray luminosities exceed the Eddington limit for a typical stellar-mass black hole. For a long time, the nature of ULXs remained unclear. However, the gradual accumulation of data, new results of X-ray and optical spectroscopy, and the study of the structure and energy of nebulae surrounding ULXs led to the understanding that most of the ultraluminous X-ray sources must be supercritical accretion disks like SS 433. The discovery of neutron stars in a number of objects only increased the confidence of the scientific community in the conclusions obtained, since the presence of neutron stars in such systems clearly indicates a supercritical accretion regime. In this review, we systematize the main facts about the observational manifestations of ULXs and SS 433 in the X-ray and optical ranges and discuss their explanation from the point of view of the supercritical accretion theory

Optical Spectroscopy of SRG/eROSITA Objects with 2.5-m Telescope at the Caucasus Mountain Observatory of the SAI MSU

© 2020, Pleiades Publishing, Inc. Based on observations with the new transient double-beam spectrograph (TDS) at the 2.5-m telescope of the Caucasus Mountain Observatory of SAI MSU, we have determined the types and found the redshifts for six new X-ray sources (four quasars and two galaxy clusters) detected by the SRG space observatory during the Lockman Hole observations at the eROSITA performance verification phase. We show that the TDS allows the spectra of objects ~20m to be taken in 2 h of observations with a signal-tonoise ratio higher than 5 and a resolution R ~1500. The types and redshifts of the objects determined from our spectroscopic observations agree well with the predictions based on photometric data using the SRGz automatic classification system