Stellar Wind Effects Of The Wolf-Rayet Star in IC 10 X-1

We studied how the stellar wind is affected by the black hole's accretion flow in IC 10 X-1 and similar WR+BH HMXB systems, the origin and evolution of the He ii 4686 emission line, and its credibility in determining the binary parameters. IC 10 X-1 has been one of the major targets to many GEMINI observations spanning 2001-19. 

Presented herein is the analysis of 52 spectra from the GEMINI/GMOS archive. We have used the phase-wise stacked spectra to create an RV curve from the He II 4686 emission line, and it shows similar behavior to previous studies(i.e quarter phase offset from x-ray eclipse). Unlike the RV the equivalent width and FWHM show variation over both phases and time, also we observed a correlation between these values and the x-ray hardness ratios. The skewness values also showed a similar behavior as the RV curve which contributes to the major physics revealed in this work. Ultimately, the results show that the He II line tracks the interaction between the BH and the stellar wind, not the stellar orbital motion. This system belongs to a group of systems that can be the progenitors of gravitational wave sources i.e NS+NS, BH+BH, or NS+BH hence proper understanding of systems like IC 10 X-1 is of paramount interest.