A Mid-Infrared Counterpart to the Magnetar 1E 2259+586

Creators: Kaplan, David L.; Chakrabarty, Deepto; Wang, Zhongxiang; Wachter, Stefanie

Abstract

We report the discovery of a 4.5μm counterpart to the anomalous X-ray pulsar (magnetar) 1E 2259+586 with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The mid-infrared flux density is 6.3 ± 1.0μJy at 4.5μm and <20 μJy (at 95% confidence) at 8μm, or 0.02% of the 2–10 keV X-ray flux (corrected for extinction). Combining our Spitzer measurements with previously published near-infrared data, we show that the overall infrared emission from 1E 2259+586 is qualitatively similar to that from the magnetar 4U 0142+61. Therefore, the passive X-ray-heated dust disk model originally developed for 4U 0142+61 might also apply to 1E 2259+586. However, the IR data from this source can also be fitted by a simple power-law spectrum as might be expected from magnetospheric emission.

Additional Information

2009. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2008 August 11, accepted for publication 2009 May 19. Published 2009 June 30. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments. This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech. Support for D.L.K. was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant 01207.01-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555 and by the National Science Foundation under Grant PHY05-51164. Guest User, Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, which is operated by the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, National Research Council of Canada.

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