Colliding-wind binaries as non-thermal X-ray emitters: an observational investigation from XMM-Newton to next generation X-ray observatories

The investigation of massive stars in the radio domain revealed about 25 years ago that some of them are synchrotron emitters, showing that these objects are able to accelerate particles up to relativistic velocities. In this context, non-thermal emission processes such as inverse Compton scattering are expected to be at work in the high-energy domain. For this reason, an observational campaign devoted to the X-ray investigation of non-thermal radio emitters has been carried out with XMM-Newton. However, considering the rather strong thermal X-ray emission from these systems below 10 keV, XMM-Newton does not appear to be the ideal observatory to detect their putative non-thermal X-rays. As a consequence, the advent of next generation X-ray observatories with a bandpass extending significantly above 10 keV (SIMBOL-X, XEUS, NEXT) is expected to provide important results related to the non-thermal high-energy emission from colliding-wind binaries and their capability to accelerate particles.