Optical and infrared emission from discs, jets and nebulae associated with X-ray binaries

Abstract

It has been found that many different sources of emission, which peak at different frequencies, are present in X-ray binary spectra and together they produce the observed broadband spectrum.  However, disentangling these components has proved challenging.

Much of the work in this thesis concerns disentangling the components that occupy the optical and near-infrared (NIR) region of the spectrum of X-ray binaries; possibly the region in which the relative contributions of the different components are least certain.  In particular one component, the synchrotron emission from jets of outflowing matter, is found in this work to contribute ubiquitously to the optical and NIR light of X-ray binaries with relatively faint stars.  These results confirm that the jets are powerful and in some of this work, observations of the jets interacting with the surrounding matter are used to infer their power.

An introduction to the subject matter is presented in Chapter 1.  Attention is given to the current thinking of the dominating optical and NIR emission processes, and to X-ray binaries that produce jets.  In Chapters 2-6 I present a number of investigations into optical and infrared observations of X-ray binaries.  Relations, patterns and general trends are discovered that have implications for not only the dominating emission processes but also for the physical conditions and general behaviour of the inflowing and outflowing matter.

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