English

Kilohertz QPO and Atoll Source States in 4U 0614+09

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

We report three RXTE/PCA observations of the low-mass X-ray binary 4U 0614+09. They show strong (~ 30% rms) band-limited noise with a cut-off frequency varying between 0.7 and 15 Hz in correlation with the X-ray flux. We observe two non-simultaneous 11-15% (rms) kHz peaks near 728 and 629 Hz in the power spectra of two of our observations when the X-ray flux is ~ 10^{-9} erg cm^{-2} s{-1} (2-10 keV), but find no QPO (< 6% rms) when the X-ray flux is half that. We suggest that count rate may not be a good measure for M˙\dot M even in sources as intrinsically weak as 4U 0614+09, and that QPO frequency and noise cutoff frequency track M˙\dot M more closely than count rate. The QPO increases in rms amplitude from (11±1.311 \pm 1.3) % at 3 keV to (37±1237 \pm 12) % at 23 keV; the fractional amplitude of the band-limited noise is energy-independent. This suggests different sites of origin for these two phenomena. The spectrum of the oscillating flux roughly corresponds to a black body with temperature (1.56±0.21.56 \pm 0.2) keV and radius (500±200 500 \pm 200) m (other models fit as well), which might indicate the oscillations originate at a small region on the neutron star surface.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9705250,
  title  = {Kilohertz QPO and Atoll Source States in 4U 0614+09},
  author = {M. Mendez and M. van der Klis and J. van Paradijs and W. H. G. Lewin and F. K. Lamb and B. A. Vaughan and E. Kuulkers and D. Psaltis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9705250},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

To appear in ApJL. AAS LaTex v4.0 (10 pages, 4 ps-figures)