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Session 18 - Stellar Winds and Rotation.
Oral session, Monday, June 10
Playcircle,
Wind collisions in early-type binaries can produce X-ray emitting gas at temperatures of millions of degrees along the collision boundary. Such localized X-ray emission can be a useful probe of the stellar wind dynamics. However, colliding wind emission can be obscured by absorption in the stellar wind material, and by the presence of X-ray emission from the individual stellar components. An important characteristic of colliding-wind X-rays is variability with binary orbital phase. Using data from the ROSAT archive, I find that nearly half of the OB type binaries observed show clear evidence of large-scale phase-dependent X-ray variability, confirming the importance of X-ray production by colliding winds in these systems.
