Advances in Understanding High-Mass X-ray Binaries with INTEGRAL and Future Directions
Creators: name: Kretschmar, Peter
name: Fürst, Felix
name: Sidoli, Lara
name: Bozzo, Enrico
name: Alfonso-Garzón, Julia
name: Bodaghee, Arash
name: Chaty, Sylvain
name: Chernyakova, Masha
name: Ferrigno, Carlo
name: Manousakis, Antonios
name: Negueruela, Ignacio
name: Postnov, Konstantin
name: Paizis, Adamantia
name: Reig, Pablo
name: Rodes-Roca, José Joaquín
name: Tsygankov, Sergey
name: Bird, Antony J.
name: Kühnel, Matthias Bissinger né
name: Blay, Pere
name: Caballero, Isabel
name: Coe, Malcolm J.
name: Domingo, Albert
name: Doroshenko, Victor
name: Ducci, Lorenzo
name: Falanga, Maurizio
name: Grebenev, Sergei A.
name: Grinberg, Victoria
name: Hemphill, Paul
name: Kreykenbohm, Ingo
name: Fritz, Sonja Kreykenbohm né
name: Li, Jian
name: Lutovinov, Alexander A.
name: Martínez-Núñez, Silvia
name: Mas-Hesse, J. Miguel
name: Masetti, Nicola
name: McBride, Vanessa A.
name: Neronov, Andrii
name: Pottschmidt, Katja
name: Rodriguez, Jérôme
name: Romano, Patrizia
name: Rothschild, Richard E.
name: Santangelo, Andrea
name: Sguera, Vito
name: Staubert, Rüdiger
name: Tomsick, John A.
name: Torrejón, José Miguel
name: Torres, Diego F.
name: Walter, Roland
name: Wilms, Jörn
name: Wilson-Hodge, Colleen A.
name: Zhang, Shu
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: High mass X-ray binaries are among the brightest X-ray sources in the Milky Way, as well as in nearby Galaxies. Thanks to their highly variable emissions and complex phenomenology, they have attracted the interest of the high energy astrophysical community since the dawn of X-ray Astronomy. In more recent years, they have challenged our comprehension of physical processes in many more energy bands, ranging from the infrared to very high energies. In this review, we provide a broad but concise summary of the physical processes dominating the emission from high mass X-ray binaries across virtually the whole electromagnetic spectrum. These comprise the interaction of stellar winds with the high gravitational and magnetic fields of compact objects, the behaviour of matter under extreme magnetic and gravity conditions, and the perturbation of the massive star evolutionary processes by presence in a binary system. We highlight the role of the INTEGRAL mission in the discovery of many of the most interesting objects in the high mass X-ray binary class and its contribution in reviving the interest for these sources over the past two decades. We show how the INTEGRAL discoveries have not only contributed to significantly increase the number of high mass X-ray binaries known, thus advancing our understanding of the population as a whole, but also have opened new windows of investigation that stimulated the multi-wavelength approach nowadays common in most astrophysical research fields. We conclude the review by providing an overview of future facilities being planned from the X-ray to the very high energy domain that will hopefully help us in finding an answer to the many questions left open after more than 18 years of INTEGRAL scientific observations.
description: 61 pages, 22 figures, 1 table, will be published in New Astronomy Reviews