A catalogue of X-ray binaries to understand their evolution
Abstract
A majority of massive stars spend a least part of their lives along with a companion star. Depending on their evolutionary stage and their orbital parameters, this can produce phenomenons that are unique to binary systems. They are born and evolve up until their final stages, where both stars collapsed into compact objects, which can brutally merge and give rise to bursts of gravitational waves. Stellar binaries can go through many peculiar phases that need to be characterized in order to better understand the various evolutionary channels that lead them to merge -or not.
One of those phases is the X-ray binary phase, where a compact object feeds on its companion star and emits great quantities of high energy radiation.
I will present how I built the latest catalogue of high-mass X-ray binaries in the Galaxy and how it can be used to probe the evolutionary mechanisms that lead massive binaries to the X-ray phase. Using that catalogue, I will go back in time in the life of known X-ray binaries to quantify the strength of the supernova that formed the compact object, and see how the explosion impacts the binary as a whole. I will then go even further back in time to find out where high-mass X-ray binaries are born within the Milky Way, which is a mean to not only put an age on these systems but also to infer the initial masses of the stars as well as how much material was exchanged prior to the X-ray phase.