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Session 68 - Degenerate Stars, Pulsars.
Display session, Thursday, June 11
Atlas Ballroom,
The properties of luminous, bursting low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) in globular cluster cores hold important clues to understanding the binary interactions in these clusters, as well as the LMXB population as a whole. Due to their crowded environments, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is required to study the optical counterparts of these sources in nearly all cases. However, the added complexity introduced by crowding is mitigated by the ability to readily determine the interstellar reddening and distance to these systems, which in turn allows accurate comparison of their luminosities and spectral energy distributions.
Here we present a homogeneous set of HST FOS spectra and WFPC2 broadband magnitudes in the same photometric system of four of these systems, namely those in NGC 1851, NGC 6624, NGC 6712, and M 15. We estimate contamination of the spectra from nearby stars, and use both the spectra and broadband magnitudes to evaluate the merits of power-law, blackbody, and simple hot stellar atmosphere models for each source. We intercompare their spectral energy distributions and discuss implications for the nature of these systems.
