We present results of an extensive investigation of the physical changes taking place in the emission regions of the LMXB X 1624-490 during strong flaring in observations made using RXTE in 1997 and 1999. Based on the detailed light curve, we propose that the flaring consists of a superposition of X-ray bursts. It is shown that major changes take place in the blackbody emission component, the t...

True reusability of components assumes that they not only offer the functionality prescribed by their APIs, but also that they conform to a well-defined set of quality attributes so that we know if a component can be successfully reused in a new software product. One of the problems with quality attributes however is that it is hard to identify the characteristics of components that contribute ...

A tight mass-temperature relation, M(r)/r ∝ TX , is expected in most cosmological models if clusters of galaxies are homologous and the intracluster gas is in global equilibrium with the dark matter. We here calibrate this relation using 8 clusters with well-defined global temperatures measured with ASCA and masses inferred from weak and strong gravitational lensing. The surface lensing masses ...

The nearby galaxy M33 hosts the most luminous steady X-ray source in the Local Group. The high spatial resolution of Chandra allows us to confirm that this ultra-luminous X-ray source is within the nucleus and rule out at the 4.6σ level a previously proposed possible counterpart located 1 away. The X-ray spectrum is well fitted by a disc blackbody with kTin=1.18±0.02 keV and Rin(cos θ)=57±3 km,...