Recent hubble space telescope results on x-ray novae

R. I. Hynes, University of Southampton
C. A. Haswell, The Open University
S. Chaty, The Open University
C. R. Shrader, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
W. Cui, Purdue University
C. W. Mauche, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Abstract

RXTE has recently discovered two new optically bright black hole candidates (BHCs): XTE J1859+226 and XTE J1118+480. We observed both with HST/STIS, the first outburst observations of X-ray novae with this instrument. We followed broad band spectral evolution, detected correlated X-ray/UV rapid variability and performed high resolution UV spectroscopy. We present a summary of initial results on the spectral energy distributions observed.