Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Scientific paper
2012-04-02
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS
Scientific paper
We present results of a comprehensive analysis of the X-ray pulsar X Persei over the period 1996 to 2011, encompassing the quite low state and subsequent strong outburst activity. Using data from the RXTE and Swift observatories we detected several consecutive outbursts, during which the source luminosity increased by a factor of ~5 up to L_x~1.2x10^{35} erg/s. Previously the source was observed in a high state only once. The source spectrum in a standard energy band (4-25 keV) is independent of the flux change and can be described by a model that includes both thermal and non-thermal components. With the help of the INTEGRAL observatory data we registered the highly significant cyclotron absorption line in the source spectrum and, for the first time, significantly detected a hard X-ray emission from the pulsar up to ~160 keV. We also report drastic changes of the pulse period during the outburst activity: a long episode of spin-down was changed to spin-up with a rate of Pdot/P = -(3-5)x10^{-4} yr^{-1}, that is several times higher than previous rates of spin-up and spin-down. To search for a correlation between the X-ray and optical lightcurves we took data from the AAVSO International Database. No significant correlation between optical and X-ray fluxes at any time lag from dozens of days to years was found.
Chernyakova Maria
Lutovinov Alexander A.
Tsygankov Sergei S.
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