10 Years of RXTE Monitoring of Anomalous X-ray Pulsar 4U 0142+61: Long-Term Variability

Details 10 Years of RXTE Monitoring of Anomalous X-ray Pulsar 4U 0142+61: Long-Term Variability 10 Years of RXTE Monitoring of Anomalous X-ray Pulsar 4U 0142+61: Long-Term Variability

2006-10-31

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0610932v1

Astrophys.SpaceSci.308:487-491,2007

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

6 pages, 6 figures, To appear in the proceedings of Isolated Neutron Stars: From the Interior to the Surface. eds. D. Page, R.

Scientific paper

10.1007/s10509-007-9313-2

We report on 10 yr of monitoring of the 8.7-s Anomalous X-ray Pulsar 4U 0142+61 using the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE). This pulsar exhibited stable rotation from 2000 until February 2006: the RMS phase residual for a spin-down model which includes nu, nudot, and nuddot is 2.3%. We report a possible phase-coherent timing solution valid over a 10-yr span extending back to March 1996. A glitch may have occured between 1998 and 2000, but it is not required by the existing data. We also report that the source's pulse profile has been evolving in the past 6 years, such that the dip of emission between its two peaks has been getting shallower since 2000, almost as if the profile is recovering to its pre-2000 morphology, in which there was no clear distinction between the peaks. These profile variations are seen in the 2-4 keV band but not in 6-8 keV. Finally, we present the pulsed flux time series of the source in 2-10 keV. There is evidence of a slow but steady increase in the source's pulsed flux since 2000. The pulsed flux variability and the narrow-band pulse profile changes present interesting challenges to aspects of the magnetar model.

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