Every three months there is a meeting among the departments of the Astronomical Institute. Each director presents some news in short, followed by a talk from a member of that department. At the Summer Interdepartmental Meeting of this year (held on Monday, 1st of June, 2015, in Ondrejov) I was “representing” the Stellar department, talking about:
“High-Mass X-ray Binaries in the Small Magellanic Cloud”
The abstract reads:
High-Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs) are a phase in the life of some binary stellar systems that consist of a compact object (black hole or neutron star) and a massive companion (an early OB-type star). Their X-ray emission is powered by the infall of matter, provided my the massive companion, into the strong gravitational field of the compact star. The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is a powerhouse of HMXB production (almost 100 systems), and due to its proximity we are able to investigate individual sources. However, we haven’t yet fully characterize its HMXB population. To address that we have initiated wide spectroscopic and Halpha imaging campaigns. I will discuss our results and how the SMC HMXB population compares with that of our Galaxy.
UPDATE 17 July 2015: A summary of my talk has been published in Czech at the site of the Astronomical Institute, and it can be found at:
Astronomický ústav AV ČR: “Pokroky ve výzkumu ve Stelárním oddělení: Studium superhmotných rentgenových dvojhvězd”.