The Link Between Star Formation Rate and Ultraluminous X-ray Sources

The goal of this research is to study the link between the location of neutron stars and black holes accreting material from companion stars at the highest accretion rates and the local star formation rate within nearby galaxies. These accreting objects, also known as Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULXs), could be intermediate mass black holes or they could represent a type of accretion onto a compact object that we don't fully understand yet. To accomplish this we took infrared and ultraviolet images from 200 nearby star forming galaxies and used them to generate star formation rate maps. We created a normalized cumulative rank pixel value function of the star formation rate to better understand the spatial correlation between the local star formation rate in this sample of 200 galaxies and the location of any ULXs in each galaxy.