Hard state neutron star and black hole X-ray binaries in the radio:X-ray luminosity plane

TL;DR

This study compares radio and X-ray luminosities of black hole and neutron star X-ray binaries, revealing differences in radio loudness and accretion physics, with implications for jet formation and accretion flow models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive regression analysis of 36 black holes and 41 neutron stars, highlighting physical differences in accretion and jet mechanisms beyond mass and bolometric corrections.

Findings

Black holes are more radio loud than neutron stars by a factor of ~22.

The radio:X-ray luminosity relation slopes are similar within uncertainties.

No clear partitioning of black hole data into separate luminosity tracks.

Abstract

Motivated by the large body of literature around the phenomenological properties of accreting black hole (BH) and neutron star (NS) X-ray binaries in the radio:X-ray luminosity plane, we carry out a comparative regression analysis on 36 BHs and 41 NSs in hard X-ray states, with data over 7 dex in X-ray luminosity for both. The BHs follow a radio to X-ray (logarithmic) luminosity relation with slope $\beta=0.59\pm0.02$, consistent with the NSs' slope ($\beta=0.44^{+0.05}_{-0.04}$) within 2.5$\sigma$. The best-fitting intercept for the BHs significantly exceeds that for the NSs, cementing BHs as more radio loud, by a factor $\sim$22. \This discrepancy can not be fully accounted for by the mass or bolometric correction gap, nor by the NS boundary layer contribution to the X-rays, and is likely to reflect physical differences in the accretion flow efficiency, or the jet powering mechanism. Once importance sampling is implemented to account for the different luminosity distributions, the slopes of the non-pulsating and pulsating NS subsamples are formally inconsistent ($>3\sigma$), unless the transitional millisecond pulsars (whose incoherent radio emission mechanism is not firmly established) are excluded from the analysis. We confirm the lack of a robust partitioning of the BH data set into separate luminosity tracks.