Speaker
Description
For many years, it has been claimed that the Galactic ridge X-ray emission is truly diffuse in nature. However, with the advance of modern X-ray satellites, it has been found that the diffuse emission is comprised of thousands of X-ray point sources. Further, many studies suggest that a vast majority of these X-ray point sources are magnetic cataclysmic variables (CVs) and active binaries. One unambiguous way to identify these magnetic CVs is by detecting their X-ray periodicity. Therefore, we systematically searched for X-ray periodic sources in the inner Galactic disk, including the Galactic Center region.
We have used data from our ongoing XMM-Newton Heritage survey of the Galactic disk plus the XMM-Newton archival observation of the GC to search for periodic sources. We detected a sample of 27 periodic sources, of which more than 50% are intermediate polars and 22% are polars. Both the IP and polar type sources display strong iron K emission in the 6-7 keV band. The X-ray spectral studies suggest that the IP-type sources display relatively harder spectra compared to Polars. In this talk, I will briefly overview the X-ray emission from accreting white dwarfs and how to utilize the X-ray observation to identify these sources.