Linking high-mass X-ray binaries to binary compact object mergers in Milky Way-like galaxies

Abstract

High-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) constitute a potential intermediate phase connecting massive stellar binaries to the formation of coalescing binary compact objects (BCOs). Yet, the specific circumstances that allow HMXBs to later develop into merging BCOs are still under debate. In this study, we focus on wind-fed HMXBs and investigate this link by generating synthetic catalogs with the population-synthesis code SEVN and assigning them to a sample of 66 Milky Way-like galaxies. Using stellar particles drawn from the TNG50 cosmological simulation, we assign HMXBs according to particle mass, age, and metallicity, and follow their subsequent evolution to BCOs. In this way, our approach provides a realistic framework for modelling HMXBs in the Milky Way by explicitly accounting for the varied metallicities and spatial distributions of binary systems. Our method recovers the spatial distribution inferred from the observed properties of Galactic HMXBs: their positions follow the spiral arms and agree with the measured radial profile. The age distribution aligns well with observations and shows that BH-HMXBs tend to be younger than NS-HMXBs. We find that the fraction of HMXBs that evolve into merging BCOs within a Hubble time for BH-HMXBs is ~0.2-3.2% (or ~0.3-5.4% when restricting to 10^35 <= L_X <= 10^40 erg s^-1), while for NS-HMXBs is ~3.6-23.4% (or ~3.5-26.0% with the same luminosity cut). We show that common envelope (CE) episodes and natal-kick magnitudes are the primary processes determining the number of merging systems. Successful BCO mergers are typically produced by systems that experienced significant orbital hardening (early CE), whereas stable mass transfer often yields wide, non-merging binaries unless extreme eccentricities are induced by kicks. Metallicity plays a secondary but important role by modulating compact-remnant masses and wind-driven orbital widening.