Thermonuclear X-ray bursts. II. Eddington limit

In this paper, we continue our systematic analysis of all the X-ray bursts observed with Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer from X-ray binaries. We determine the events that show clear evidence for photospheric radius expansion and measure the Eddington limits for these accreting neutron stars using the bolometric fluxes attained at the touchdown moments of each X-ray burst.

We employ a Bayesian technique to investigate the degree to which the Eddington limit for each source remains constant between bursts. We find that for sources with a large number of radius expansion bursts, systematic uncertainties are at a 5%-10% level. Moreover, in six sources with only pairs of Eddington-limited bursts, the distribution of fluxes is consistent with a ~10% fractional dispersion.