SIMBAD references

A statistic, w, the differential coefficient of the mean absolute difference of an observed light curve, is proposed for timescale analysis of shot widths. The shortest width of random shots can be measured by the position of the lower cutoff in the timescale spectrum of w. We use the statistic to analyze X-ray light curves from a sample of neutron star and black hole binaries, and the results show that the timescale analysis can help us distinguish between neutron star binaries and black hole binaries. The analysis can further reveal the structure and dynamics of accretion disks around black holes.