Spectra of quasiperiodic oscillations of galactic X-ray sources–dynamical regimes from a simple model

Abstract

We suggest that the dynamical regime(s) underlying quasi-periodic oscillations observed in the spectra of bright galactic-bulge X-ray sources are nonlinear with a mixed phase space. The important feature of such regimes is that they are generic among nonlinear Hamiltonian and nearly Hamiltonian systems of more than two degrees of freedom. We give a simple example of such chaotic (deterministic) systems whose spectra share a number of features with those observed for quasiperiodic oscillations of such sources.