A Fundamental Plane in X-ray Binary Activity of External Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper presents a new catalog of extragalactic X-ray binaries, revealing a fundamental plane relation among their total X-ray luminosity, star formation rate, and stellar mass, supported by population synthesis modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive XRB catalog and identifies a novel fundamental plane relation among key galaxy parameters, supported by population synthesis analysis.

Findings

A catalog of 4430 XRBs in 237 galaxies within 130 Mpc.

Discovery of a fundamental plane linking X-ray luminosity, star formation rate, and stellar mass.

Population synthesis suggests specific fractions of high and low mass XRBs in binary systems.

Abstract

We construct a new catalog of extragalactic X-ray binaries (XRBs) by matching the latest Chandra source catalog with local galaxy catalogs. Our XRB catalog contains 4430 XRBs hosted by 237 galaxies within ~130 Mpc. As XRBs dominate the X-ray activity in galaxies, the catalog enables us to study the correlations between the total X-ray luminosity of a galaxy $L_{X,\rm tot}$, star formation rate $\dot{\rho}_\star$, and stellar mass $M_\star$. As previously reported, $L_{X,\rm tot}$ is correlated with $\dot{\rho}_\star$ and $M_\star$. In particular, we find that there is a fundamental plane in those three parameters as $\log L_{X,\rm tot}={38.80^{+0.09}_{-0.12}}+\log(\dot{\rho}_\star + \alpha M_\star)$, where $\alpha = {(3.36\pm1.40)\times10^{-11}}\ {\rm yr^{-1}}$. In order to investigate this relation, we construct a phenomenological binary population synthesis model. We find that the high mass XRB and low mass XRB fraction in formed compact object binary systems is ~9% and ~0.04%, respectively. Utilizing the latest XMM-Newton, and Swift X-ray source catalog data sets, additional XRB candidates are also found resulting in 5757 XRBs hosted by 311 galaxies.