Inconstant peak fluxes of photospheric radius-expansion thermonuclear X-ray bursts

Details Inconstant peak fluxes of photospheric radius-expansion thermonuclear X-ray bursts Inconstant peak fluxes of photospheric radius-expansion thermonuclear X-ray bursts

Apr 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002aps..aprs11004g&link_type=abstract

American Physical Society, April Meeting, Jointly Sponsored with the High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American As

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

We have analyzed 465 type-I X-ray bursts from 35 accreting neutron stars, in 5 years of public data from RXTE. We present a study of bursts which exhibit photospheric radius-expansion from seven sources. Contrary to theoretical predictions, we find that the peak flux is not constant, with standard deviations of 6--21% depending upon the source. For most of the sources the peak flux distributions are Gaussian. In 4U 1636-536 however, we find evidence for a bimodal distribution, with a separation factor of 1.7. We attribute this bimodality to significant variations in the composition of the photosphere, primarily due to variations in the accretion rate. For 4U 1728-34, we find that the peak flux varies on the same time scale as the persistent X-ray emission and X-ray colors, ≈ 40 d. It is likely that accretion rate variations in this source also contribute significantly to the variance in the peak burst flux. We discuss the implications of these results for distance estimates derived from radius-expansion bursts.

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