Ultrafast outflows in ultraluminous X-ray sources

TL;DR

This paper reports the detection of ultrafast winds in ultraluminous X-ray sources, providing evidence for super-Eddington accretion onto stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars, and discusses implications for understanding these extreme systems.

Contribution

The study presents the first resolved detection of blueshifted absorption lines indicating ultrafast winds in ULXs, supporting super-Eddington accretion models.

Findings

Detection of rest-frame emission and blueshifted absorption lines (~0.2c) in ULX spectra.

Evidence of powerful ultrafast winds surrounding the compact objects.

Confirmation of hyper-Eddington accretion models in ULXs.

Abstract

Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are bright extragalactic sources with X-ray luminosities above 10^39 erg/s powered by accretion onto compact objects. According to the first studies performed with XMM-Newton ULXs seemed to be excellent candidates to host intermediate-mass black holes (10^2-4 solar masses). However, in the last years the interpretation of super-Eddington accretion onto stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars for most ULXs has gained a strong consensus. One critical missing piece to confirm the super-Eddington scenario was the direct detection of the massive, radiatively-driven winds expected as atomic emission/absorption lines in ULX spectra. The first evidence for winds was found as residuals in the soft X-ray spectra of ULXs. Most recently we have been able to resolve these residuals into rest-frame emission and blueshifted (~0.2c) absorption lines arising from highly ionized gas in the deep high-resolution XMM-Newton spectra of two ultraluminous X-ray sources. The compact object is therefore surrounded by powerful ultrafast winds as predicted by models of hyper-Eddington accretion. Here we discuss the relevance of these discoveries and the importance of further, deep, XMM-Newton observations of powerful winds in many other ultraluminous X-ray sources to estimate the energetics of the wind, the geometry of the system, and the masses of the central accretors.