A fresh look at the low-mass X-ray binaries

The reported systemic velocities of the low-mass X-ray binaries (=LMXBs) are found to be unreliable, because of intrinsic Doppler shifts. We argue that the non-globular-cluster LMXBs form a disk population, whose typicalz-velocities are unlikely to exceed 30 km s^–1. They are moderately old and rare (among neutron-star sources) and have oscillated through the disk a number of times.