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Published December 20, 2013 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

NuSTAR Observations of Magnetar 1E 1841–045

Abstract

We report new spectral and temporal observations of the magnetar 1E 1841–045 in the Kes 73 supernova remnant obtained with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array. Combined with new Swift and archival XMM-Newton and Chandra observations, the phase-averaged spectrum is well characterized by a blackbody plus double power law, in agreement with previous multimission X-ray results. However, we are unable to reproduce the spectral results reported based on Suzaku observations. The pulsed fraction of the source is found to increase with photon energy. The measured rms pulsed fractions are ~12% and ~17% at ~20 and ~50 keV, respectively. We detect a new feature in the 24-35 keV band pulse profile that is uniquely double peaked. This feature may be associated with a possible absorption or emission feature in the phase-resolved spectrum. We fit the X-ray data using the recently developed electron-positron outflow model by Beloborodov for the hard X-ray emission from magnetars. This produces a satisfactory fit, allowing a constraint on the angle between the rotation and magnetic axes of the neutron star of ~20° and on the angle between the rotation axis and line of sight of ~50°. In this model, the soft X-ray component is inconsistent with a single blackbody; adding a second blackbody or a power-law component fits the data. The two-blackbody interpretation suggests a hot spot of temperature kT ≈ 0.9 keV occupying ~1% of the stellar surface.

Additional Information

© 2013 American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 August 12; accepted 2013 October 22; published 2013 December 3. This work was supported under NASA contract NNG08FD60C, and made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software, and Calibration Teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research has made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS), jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (US). V.M.K. acknowledges support from an NSERC Discovery Grant, the FQRNT Centre de Recherche Astrophysique du Québec, an R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology. A.M.B. acknowledges the support by NASA grants NNX10AI72G and NNX13AI34G. Part of this work was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

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Submitted - 1310.6221v2.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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