A search for periodicity in the x ray spectrum of black hole candidate A0620-00

The archived data from the SAS-3 observations of the X-ray nova A0620-00, the best of the stellar blackhole candidates, were exhaustively examined for evidence of variable phenomena correlated with the orbital motion of the binary system of which it is a member. The original analysis of these data was completed before discovery of the binary companion and determination of the orbital period of the system. New interest was drawn to the task of a reexamination of the archive data by the recent discovery of the massive nature of the X-ray source through analysis of the Doppler variations and ellipsoidal light variations of the faint K-star companion by McClintock and Remillard. The archive research, carried out under the supervision of the principal investigator, was the topic of the thesis submitted to the MIT Department of Physics by Kenneth Plaks in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Plaks' effort was focused on the elimination of fluctuations in the data due to errors in attitude solutions and other extraneous causes. The first products of his work were long-term light curves of the X-ray intensities in the various energy channels as functions of time during the time from outbursts in August 1975 to quiescence approximately 6 months later. These curves, are refined versions of the preliminary results published in 1976 (Matilsky et al. 1976). Smooth exponentials were fitted to these long term light curves to provide the basis for detrending the data, thereby permitting a calculation of residuals derived by subtracting the fitted curve from the data. The residuals were then analyzed by Fourier analysis to search for variations with the period of the binary orbit, namely 7.75 hours. No evidence of an orbital periodicity was found. However, the refined light curve provides a much clearer picture of the outburst and subsequent decay of the X-ray luminosity. In fact, there were two outbursts, each followed by an exponential decay with similar time constants of about 25 days. Previous evidence of a three-oscillation variation with a 7.8 day period were confirmed. Substantial theoretical effort has been devoted to attempts to account for the decay characteristics as the result of the gradual eating up of an accretion disk by a stellar-mass blackhole (e.g., Huang and Wheeler 1989). The improved decay curves will provide significant new constraints on the theoretical analyses

A spectroscopic analysis of the starburst galaxies Ngc 3395 and Ngc 3396

We have obtained ultraviolet and visible wavelength spectra of 31 bright star forming knots in the interacting galaxies NGC 3395 and NGC 3396 using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space Telescope. The knots are possible super star clusters on the order of ∼100 pc diameter with measured metallicities on the order of 0.5--0.6 Z⊙ . The spectra are consistent with a massive production of hot young stars in a starburst; Ages of the starburst knots were calculated using several diagnostics from the Leitherer et al. Starburst 99 code (SB99) using an Initial Mass Function (IMF) with a power law coefficient alpha = 2.35 and an upper mass limit of 100 M⊙ . We modeled our star forming knots as instantaneous starbursts with the measured metallicity and we obtained consistent and reasonable estimates of the starburst age. The UV-brightest knots are ∼5 Myr old in both galaxies. We found no age gradient in the galaxies implying the starburst does not propagate across the galaxy but rather occurs simultaneously everywhere. The data are also consistent with the interpretation that the starburst is not only happening more or less simultaneously within each galaxy, it is also occurring simultaneously in both galaxies. If true, the fact that it is occurring simultaneously in both galaxies gives credence to the interaction being the source of the star formation in line with current theory; While our starforming knots were spatially resolved, at high redshift one cannot resolve individual knots and instead has to rely on spatially unresolved spectra. To assess the representativeness of these spectra of the underlying structure, we simulated the spectra one would observe by defining the entire portion of each galaxy observed as an unresolved knot. We found the metallicities for the unresolved knots were very representative of the resolved knots that made them up. We also found that the ages we derived for the unresolved knots were representative of the underlying resolved knot ages to approximately a factor of 2--3; We measured the flux in the broad He II lambda4686 emission line characteristic of Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars. Uncorrected for reddening, we estimated ∼250 WR and ∼1100 O stars in NGC 3395 and ∼400 WR and ∼2500 O stars in NGC 3396. We were unable to subcategorize the WR stars, although the spectra do have some characteristics of WN stars; We discovered a super bubble in NGC 3395 with a radius of approximately 24 pc containing ∼80 WR stars uncorrected for reddening. We calculate that it also contains ∼25 O stars although we suspect that we have severely underestimated this value and a more representative value may be as many as 420 O stars uncorrected for reddening