A mechanism for X-ray production in Sco X-1

Abstract

In this brief talk I should like to present a summary of some recent results on the mechanism of X -ray production in extars, with special emphasis on Sco X-1. These results are an outcome of a close collaboration between Professor S. Olbert of M.I.T. and me. As mentioned by Professor Burbidge earlier today, we hypothesize that galactic X-ray sources are in fact entities wherein ‘frozen in’, compressed magnetic field rapidly relaxes by transferring magnetic field energy to ultrarelativistic (u.r.) electrons. Consider a volume of space filled with magnetoactive plasma. For reasons elaborated on elsewhere (Manley & Olbert 1968, 1969) we do not expect the ionized gas to be homogeneous. Rather we expect it to consist of an aggregate of long thin plasmoids acting almost independently of one another. We now postulate the presence of random Alfvén waves (m.h.d. noise) propagating back and forth, along the plasmoids, and inquire into the possibility of charged particle acceleration by interaction with these noisy plasmoids. This is akin to the cosmic ray acceleration mechanism proposed by Fermi, who however, considered only interactions with large, approximately spherical plasmoids.