Impact on orbital period of X-ray Binary system attached to a cosmic string

Abstract

Cosmic strings attached to rotating black holes extract its rotational energy, resulting in a mass loss and reduced spin. In this paper we discuss the proposed methods to detect these phenomena and present a novel methodology based on existing literature, by considering a Low Mass X-ray binary system. We investigate the impact of a cosmic string interacting with a black hole in an X-ray binary system and attempt to explain the observations of unexpected orbital period changes in such systems by proposing mass loss by cosmic strings to be a potential cause. For a period change of order $10^{-10}$, the string tension is $\sim 10^{-17}$, lying in the predicted range for cosmic string tension. An analysis of multiple low mass X-ray binary systems is carried out and it is shown that a significant and observable change occurs for a string tension $\sim 10^{-11}$.