RXTE/OSSE Fits to the Hard State Spectrum of Cygnus X-1

Details RXTE/OSSE Fits to the Hard State Spectrum of Cygnus X-1 RXTE/OSSE Fits to the Hard State Spectrum of Cygnus X-1

2002-04-15

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0204235v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

submitted to MNRAS, 9 pages, 4 figures

Scientific paper

We present three spectra of Cygnus X-1 in the low/hard state from 3-1000 keV produced with RXTE and OSSE. We demonstrate that a pure thermal Comptonization model, with Compton reflection fits the data well, with coronal temperatures of about 90 keV, optical depths of about 1.3, and reflection fractions of about 0.25 $\times$ 2$\pi$. We find that no additional components are necessary to fit the data, although the presence of an additional non-thermal component does result in a marginal improvement to the goodness of the fit. Two of the observations are fit better by an almost purely non-thermal Comptonization model with $\Gamma_{inj}$ of $\sim$ 3.2 for the electrons and the other parameters essentially the same as for the thermal model, while the third observation is also consistent with this model. Observations that could break this degeneracy are discussed. We also demonstrate that the low reflection parameter (i.e. $R/2\pi<1$) is due to a lack of strong curvature in the 30-50 keV range of the spectrum and not due to ionization effects. The spectrum changes very little over the three weeks of the observations, in accordance with a three week correlation timescale found in the All Sky Monitor data. We show that for a purely thermal corona, the radius of the corona must be between $3\times 10^6$ and $1.5\times 10^{10}$ cm, while the radius of a hybrid corona or a purely non-thermal corona is constrained to be between $10^8$ and $10^9$ cm.

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