The black hole transient MAXI J1348–630: evolution of the compact and transient jets during its 2019/2020 outburst

Creators: Carotenuto, F.; Corbel, S.; Tremou, E.; Russell, T. D.; Tzioumis, A.; Fender, R. P.; Woudt, P. A.; Motta, S. E.; Miller-Jones, J. C. A.; Chauhan, J.; Tetarenko, A. J.; Sivakoff, G. R.; Heywood, I.; Horesh, A.; van der Horst, A. J.; Koerding, E.; Mooley, K. P.

Abstract

We present the radio and X-ray monitoring campaign of the 2019/2020 outburst of MAXI J1348–630, a new black hole X-ray binary (BH XRB) discovered in 2019 January. We observed MAXI J1348–630 for ∼14 months in the radio band with MeerKAT and the Australia Telescope Compact Array, and in the X-rays with MAXI and Swift/XRT. Throughout the outburst, we detected and tracked the evolution of compact and transient jets. Following the main outburst, the system underwent at least four hard-state-only re-flares, during which compact jets were again detected. For the major outburst, we observed the rise, quenching and reactivation of compact jets, as well as two single-sided discrete ejecta travelling away from the BH, launched ∼2 months apart. These ejecta displayed the highest proper motion (≳100 mas d⁻¹) ever measured for an accreting BH binary. From the jet motion, we constrain the ejecta inclination and speed to be ≤46° and ≥0.69 c, and the opening angle and transverse expansion speed of the first component to be ≤6° and ≤0.05 c. We also infer that the first ejection happened at the hard-to-soft state transition, before a strong radio flare, while the second ejection was launched during a short excursion from the soft to the intermediate state. After travelling with constant speed, the first component underwent a strong deceleration, which was covered with unprecedented detail and suggested that MAXI J1348–630 could be located inside a low-density cavity in the interstellar medium, as already proposed for XTE J1550–564 and H1743–322.

Additional Information

© 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) Accepted 2021 March 22. Received 2021 March 5; in original form 2021 January 1. We thank the anonymous referee for the careful reading of the manuscript and for providing valuable comments. We thank the staff at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) for scheduling these observations. The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. This work was carried out in part using facilities and data processing pipelines developed at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA). IDIA is a partnership of the Universities of Cape Town, of the Western Cape and of Pretoria. FC, SC and TR thank Jamie Stevens and staff from the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) for scheduling the ATCA radio observations. The Australia Telescope Compact Array is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is funded by the Australian Government for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. We also thank Swift for the scheduling of the X-ray observations. FC thanks Jerome Rodriguez for useful discussions regarding the Swift/XRT data analysis. This research has made use of the XRT Data Analysis Software (XRTDAS) developed under the responsibility of the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC), Italy. FC and SC thank Diego Altamirano and Liang Zhang for useful discussions on the NICER data. We acknowledge the use of data obtained from the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. FC acknowledges support from the project Initiative d'Excellence (IdEx) of Université de Paris (ANR-18-IDEX-0001). TDR acknowledges financial contribution from the agreement ASI-INAF n.2017-14-H.0. We acknowledge the use of the Nançay Data Center, hosted by the Nançay Radio Observatory (Observatoire de Paris-PSL, CNRS, Université d'Orléans), and also supported by Region Centre-Val de Loire. This research has made use of MAXI data provided by RIKEN, JAXA and the MAXI team. GRS acknowledges support from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants (RGPIN-06569-2016). AH acknowledges support by the I-Core Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Israel Science Foundation, support by the ISF grant 647/18, and support from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). This research was supported by a Grant from the GIF, the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. DATA AVAILABILITY. The un-calibrated MeerKAT and ATCA visibility data are publicly available at the SARAO and ATNF archives, respectively at https://archive.sarao.ac.za and https://atoa.atnf.csiro.au. The Swift/XRT data are instead available from the Swift archive: https://www.swift.ac.uk/swift_portal, while the MAXI data can be downloaded from http://maxi.riken.jp/mxondem.

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