The 2013 outburst of a transient very faint X-ray binary, 23 arcsec from Sgr A*
Abstract
We report observations using the Swift/XRT, NuSTAR, and Chandra X-ray telescopes of the transient X-ray source CXOGC J174540.0-290005 during its 2013 outburst. Due to its location in the field of multiple observing campaigns targeting Sgr A*, this is one of the best-studied outbursts of a very faint X-ray binary (VFXB; peak LX < 10^(36) erg s^(−1)) yet recorded, with detections in 173 ks of X-ray observations over 50 d. VFXBs are of particular interest, due to their unusually low outburst luminosities and time-averaged mass transfer rates, which are hard to explain within standard accretion physics and binary evolution. The 2013 outburst of CXOGC J174540.0-290005 peaked at L_X(2–10 keV) = 5.0 × 10^(35) erg s^(−1), and all data above 10^(34) erg s^(−1) were well fitted by an absorbed power law of photon index ∼1.7, extending from 2 keV out to ≳ 70 keV. We discuss the implications of these observations for the accretion state of CXOGC J174540.0-290005.
Additional Information
© 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 April 30. Received 2014 April 29. In original form 2014 March 24. First published online June 4, 2014 We are very grateful for the hard work by the staff and directors of the observatories, and in particular, to Scott Wolk, Patrick Slane, and Dillon Foight at the CXC, for enabling our monitoring campaigns of the Galactic Center. COH is supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and an Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award. DH is supported by Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) Award numbers GO3-14121X, GO3-14099X, and G03-14060X, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of NASA under contract and also by NASA Swift grant NNX14AC30G. NR is supported by a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship, NWO Vidi award, and grants AYA 2012-39303, SGR2009-811, and iLINK 2011-0303. ND is supported by NASA through Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number HST-HF-51287.01-A from STScI. This research made use of data obtained from the Chandra Data Archive and software provided by the Chandra X-ray Center in the application packages CIAO, CHIPS, and SHERPA. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is operated by Associated Universities Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The Swift/XRT Data Analysis Software (XRTDAS) is developed under the responsibility of the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC), Italy. We acknowledge extensive use of the ADS and arXiv.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 56275
- DOI
- 10.1093/mnras/stu887
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150401-100203659
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award
- GO3-14121X
- NASA
- GO3-14099X
- NASA
- G03-14060X
- NASA
- NNX14AC30G
- NASA
- Ramon y Cajal Fellowship
- AYA 2012-39303
- Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC)
- SGR2009-811
- Agencia de Gestió D'Ajuts Universitaris I de Recerca Agaur
- HST-HF-51287.01-A
- NASA
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
- Created
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2015-04-01Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- NuSTAR