Distances to Accreting X-ray pulsars: impact of the Gaia DR2 (1806.11397v2)

Abstract: A well constrained estimate of the distance remains one of the main factors to properly interpret the observations of accreting X-ray pulsars. Since these objects are typically well studied, multiple distance estimates obtained with different methods are available for many members of the class. Here we summarize all distance estimates published in the literature for a sample of Galactic X-ray pulsars, and compare them with direct distance measurements obtained by the Gaia mission. We conclude that the spread of distance values obtained for individual objects by the different conventional methods is usually larger than one might expect from the quoted individual uncertainties, such that Gaia values are in many cases a very useful additional information. For distances larger than 5 kpc, however, the uncertainties of all distance estimates (including those of Gaia) remain comparatively large, so conventional methods will likely retain their importance. We provide, therefore, an aposteriori estimate of the systematic uncertainty for each method based on the comparison with the more accurate Gaia distance measurements.