Intermittent and Transient Behavior in Cygnus X-1 and GRS 1915+105 X-ray Emission

Download or read book Intermittent and Transient Behavior in Cygnus X-1 and GRS 1915+105 X-ray Emission written by Daniel V. Engovatov and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much work has been done on trying to gain insight into the dynamics of accreting systems, such as black hole and neutron star binaries, by analyzing timing measurements from X-ray telescopes. In this thesis we present a novel approach to this problem using a kurtosis measure of the wavelet distribution obtained from the light curve to quantify the presence of intermittent activity. This method is applied to large RXTE data sets for GRS 1915+105, and Cygnus X-1. We demonstrate a new approach to reveal bursting modes. Negative correlation between the presence of a low frequency QPO in the Cygnus X-1 Fourier power spectrum and a wavelet kurtosis indicator of temporal intermittency is observed. A possible interpretation of this anti-correlation is developed using a "dripping handrail" transient chaos model.