The nature of very faint X-ray binaries: hints from light curves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Very faint X-ray binaries (VFXBs), defined as having peak luminosities LX of 1034–1036 erg s−1, have been uncovered in significant numbers, but remain poorly understood. We analyse three published outburst light curves of two transient VFXBs using the exponential and linear decay formalism of King & Ritter. The decay time-scales and brink luminosities suggest orbital periods of order 1 h. We review various estimates of VFXB properties, and compare these with suggested explanations of the nature of VFXBs. We suggest that: (1) VFXB outbursts showing linear decays might be explained as partial drainings of the disc of ‘normal’ X-ray transients, and many VFXB outbursts may belong to this category; (2) VFXB outbursts showing exponential decays are best explained by old, short-period systems involving mass transfer from a low-mass white dwarf or brown dwarf; (3) persistent (or quasi-persistent) VFXBs, which maintain an LX of 1034–1035 erg s−1 for years, may be explained by magnetospheric choking of the accretion flow in a propeller effect, permitting a small portion of the flow to accrete on to the neutron star's surface. We thus predict that (quasi-) persistent VFXBs may also be transitional millisecond pulsars, turning on as millisecond radio pulsars when their LX drops below 1032 erg s−1.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".