8th HEAD Meeting, 8-11 September, 2004
Session 25 X-ray Binaries and White Dwarfs
Poster, Friday, September 10, 2004, 9:00am-10:00pm

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[25.16] RXTE Observations of Periodic Outbursts from X-ray Pulsars in the Small Magellanic Cloud

R.H.D. Corbet (NASA GSFC/USRA), C.B. Markwardt (NASA GSFC/U. Maryland), F.E. Marshall (NASA GSFC), S. Laycock (CfA), M.J. Coe, W.R.T. Edge (Southampton)

RXTE is conducting a long term monitoring program to discover and study X-ray pulsars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. We present here recent measurements of outburst recurrence periods for sources including 2E 0050.1-7247, which has a pulse period of 8.89s and a recurrence period of 28 days, and "XTE SMC144" which has a pulse period of 144s and a recurrence period of 61 days. The outburst periods are believed to reveal the orbital periods of Be/neutron star binaries. The parameters of these sources and other X-ray pulsars in the SMC and the Galaxy are plotted on a diagram of pulse vs. orbital period (Corbet 1984, 1986). So far, in spite of the large metallicity differences of these two galaxies, the same well-known correlation between pulse and orbital periods exists for systems in both galaxies and no large difference in the nature of the relationship is found between Galactic and SMC systems.


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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #3
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.