A New Method to Use Chandra Data to Resolve the X-Ray Halos Around Point Sources and Its Application to Cygnus X-1

Details A New Method to Use Chandra Data to Resolve the X-Ray Halos Around Point Sources and Its Application to Cygnus X-1 A New Method to Use Chandra Data to Resolve the X-Ray Halos Around Point Sources and Its Application to Cygnus X-1

2003-03-06

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0303149v2

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Extend the region to 2 acrmin and make some corrections, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

Scientific paper

With excellent angular resolution, good energy resolution and broad energy band, the Chandra ACIS is the best instrument for studying the X-ray halos around some galactic X-ray point sources caused by the dust scattering of X-rays in the interstellar medium. However, the direct images of bright sources obtained with ACIS usually suffer from severe pile-up. Making use of the fact that an isotropic image could be reconstructed from its projection into any direction, we can reconstruct the images of the X-ray halos from the data obtained with the HETGS and/or in CC mode. These data have no or less serious pile-up and enable us to take full advantage of the excellent angular resolution of Chandra. With the reconstructed high resolution images, we can probe the X-ray halos as close as 1$''$ to their associated point sources. Applying this method to Cygnus X-1 observed with Chandra HETGS in CC mode, we derived an energy dependent radial halo flux distribution and concluded that, in a circular region (2$'$ in radius) centered at the point source: (1) relative to the total intensity, the fractional halo intensity (FHI) is about 15% at $\sim$1 keV and drops to about 5% at $\sim$6 keV; (2) about 50% of the halo photons are within the region of a radius less than 40$''$; and (3) the spectrum of the point source is slightly distorted by the halo contamination.

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