Title: Sub-luminous accreting neutron stars and black holes

Speaker: Rudy Wijnands (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Time & Place: Thursday, 3.00pm, May 2nd, Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

Abstract: Sub-luminous accreting black holes and neutron stars in Galactic X-ray transients have atypical low X-ray luminosities of 1e34-1e36 erg/s (compared to the 1e37 to 1e39 erg/s observed for ordinary transients), which corresponds to <<1% of the Eddington luminosity. The last decade a large amount of observational information on the behaviour of those systems at such low accretion rates has been obtained, both for brighter transients which on their way to their quiescent state go through this accretion rate regime (often displaying enigmatic behaviour), as well as for those transients which never become brighter than 1e35-1e36 erg/s. I will present a short overview of our knowledge of those systems and what we can learn from them with respect to the theories explaining accretion flows (including outflows) near black holes and neutron stars and how we can make progress in this field.