High-resolution spectral analysis of transient pulsars in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Date Issued
2017
Author(s)
Abstract
At low energies the spectra of several X-ray binary pulsars show a significant excess over the main power-law component. Although various physical processes (both thermal and non-thermal) have been invoked to produce this excess, its origin is still unclear. The best sources to study this type of feature are the transient pulsars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which can reach high luminosities (L_{X} > 10^{38} erg s^{-1}) and, thanks to the low absorption in the SMC direction, can provide high statistics spectra at low energies. In the last three years we observed with XMM-Newton the large outburst of three of these transient pulsars (RX J0059.2-7138, SMC X-2, and IGR J01572-7259). Thanks to the high throughput and spectral resolution of XMM, these observations allowed us to investigate at an unprecedented level of detail their spectral and timing properties at soft X-ray energies. We found that these sources show a pulsed emission also at low energies, and that they are characterized by a significant thermal component of low temperature (kT ∼ 0.2 keV); moreover, we discovered several emission and absorption features, which are very likely produced by photoionization of plasma located above the inner regions of the accretion disc.
Coverage
The X-ray Universe 2017
Start page
124
Conferenece
The X-ray Universe 2017
Conferenece place
Roma
Conferenece date
6-9 giugno, 2017
Ads BibCode
2017xru..conf..124L
Rights
open.access
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X-ray-2017_La-Palombara_BeXRBs-in-SMC_talk.pdf
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Talk
Size
2.93 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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