Feedback from X-ray binaries in the Cosmic Dawn

PELLIZZA, L.J.; BADARACCO, M.B.; CHISARI, N.E.; ESCOBAR, G.J.; PEDROSA, S.E.; BIGNONE, L.A.; CATALDI, P.A.; ARTALE, M.C.; TISSERA, P.B.

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Workshop of the Southern Astrophysics Network 2023; 2023

Massive stars are one of the main drivers of galaxy evolution due to theenergy and matter that they inject into their surroundings. During their lives, they release powerful winds and produce intense fields of ionizing radiation. After exhausting their fuel they explode as supernovae, injecting huge amounts of kinetic and thermal energy into the ambient medium and enriching it with metals. Although the main contributions to this feedback have been thoroughly investigated, there are some aspects still poorly explored. A fraction of these stars are born in close binary systems in which, at some evolutionary stages, accretion is the main source of energy. These systems, called X-ray binaries, emit large amounts of high-energy radiation. In some cases they display accretion-disk winds and relativistic jets that inflate large energetic bubbles around them. One of the most interesting characteristics of X-ray binaries is that their populations are more numerous at low metallicities, which makes them interesting sources of feedback in the early Universe. It has been proposed that this feedback may have contributed to the regulation of the cosmic star formation rate at the Cosmic Dawn, and also to the reionization of the intergalactic medium at redshift z ~ 10. However, obtaining a quantitative estimate of this contribution has proven difficult, mainly because of the lack of knowledge about the properties of the sources at those early epochs. A step forward could be made by combining stellar population synthesis codes with cosmological simulations of galaxy formation to predict these properties, and therefore quantify the amount of feedback energy released by them. In this talk I will discuss the progress made by our group in this line, and show some preliminary results obtained.