Universal persistence in astrophysical sources

Abstract

We study the temporal correlations in 412 light curves of X-ray sources present in the public data collected by the instrument All Sky Monitor on board of the satellite Rossi X-ray timing explorer. The temporal light curves were analyzed applying detrended fluctuation analysis. The fluctuation of the X-ray light curves coming from astrophysical systems present temporal self-affinity as an intrinsic behavior. We present the results from cataclysmic variables, X-ray binary systems, galaxies, pulsars and other X-ray sources independently and we observe a universal behavior in the long-range scaling exponent α.