A microquasar shot out from its birth place

Free access article

Issue		A&A Volume 422, Number 2, August I 2004


Page(s)		L29 - L32
Section		Letters
DOI		http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:200400016

A&A 422, L29-L32 (2004)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:200400016

Letter

A microquasar shot out from its birth place

I. F. Mirabel^{1, 2}, I. Rodrigues^{1, 3} and Q. Z. Liu^{1, 4}

¹ Service d'Astrophysique, CEA-Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
e-mail: fmirabel@cea.fr
² Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio/Conicet. Bs As, Argentina
³ Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, CP 15001, 91501-970 Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
⁴ Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, PR China

(Received 31 March 2004 / Accepted 25 May 2004 )

Abstract
We show that the microquasar LS I +61 $^{\circ}$ 303 is running away from its birth place in a young complex of massive stars. The supernova explosion that formed the compact object shot out the X-ray binary with a linear momentum of $430\pm140 ~M_{\odot}$ km s ^-1, which is comparable to the linear momenta found in solitary runaway neutron stars and millisecond pulsars. The properties of the binary system and its runaway motion of $27\pm6$ km s ^-1 imply that the natal supernova was asymmetric and that the upper limit for the mass that could have been suddenly ejected in the explosion is ~2 $M_{\odot}$ . The initial mass of the progenitor star of the compact object that is inferred depends on whether the formation of massive stars in the parent stellar cluster was coeval or a sequential process.

Key words: stars: individual: LS I +61 $^{\circ}$ 303, 2CG 135+01, 3EG J0241+6103 -- X-rays: binaries: stars -- gamma-rays: observations -- gamma-rays: theory

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