We study time series of x-ray sources of 129 stellar binary systems present in the public data collected by the instrument All Sky Monitor on board of the satellite Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. The light time series was analyzed by applying detrended fluctuation analysis to estimate the long-range power-law correlation exponents $\alpha .$ The scaling exponent was calculated for all systems and its value indicated a signature of each kind of system, i.e., whether flare takes place (with $\alpha =1.22)$ or not (with $\alpha =0.64).\mathrm{}$ As a consequence, our results may identify the stability of the systems from the scaling exponent $\alpha$ value, for instance, if $\alpha \sim 0.5$ (white noise) the system is stable and unstable when $\alpha \ne 0.5$ (long-range power-law correlation).

• Received 29 March 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.68.041104