Abstract

ABSTRACT Black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) offer insights into extreme gravitational environments and the testing of general relativity. The X-ray spectrum collected by NICER offers valuable information on the properties and behaviour of BHBs through spectral fitting. However, traditional spectral fitting methods are slow and scale poorly with model complexity. This paper presents a new semisupervised autoencoder neural network for parameter prediction and spectral reconstruction of BHBs, showing an improvement of up to a factor of 2700 in speed while maintaining comparable accuracy. The approach maps the spectral features from the numerous outbursts catalogued by NICER and generalizes them to new systems for efficient and accurate spectral fitting. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated in the spectral fitting of BHBs and holds promise for use in other areas of astronomy and physics for categorizing large data sets. The code is available via https://github.com/EthanTreg/Spectrum-Machine-Learning.

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