English

Multitude of iron lines including a Compton scattered component in OAO 1657--415 detected with Chandra

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2019-01-23 v1

Abstract

We present a high resolution X-ray spectrum of the accreting X-ray pulsar, OAO 1657--415 with HETG+ACIS-S onboard \emph{Chandra},revealing the presence of a broad line component around \sim 6.3 keV associated with the neutral iron Kα_\alpha line at 6.4 \rm{keV}. This is interpreted as Compton shoulder arising from the Compton scattering of the 6.4 \rm{keV} fluorescence photons making OAO 1657--415 the second accreting neutron star where such a feature is detected. A Compton shoulder reveals the presence of dense matter surrounding the X-ray source. We did not detect any periodicity in the lightcurve and obtained an upper limit of \sim 2\% for the pulse fraction during this observation. This could be due to the smearing of the pulses when X-ray photons are scattered from a large region around the neutron star. In addition to the Fe Kα_\alpha, Fe KβK_\beta and Ni KαK_\alpha lines already reported for this source, we also report for the first time, the presence of He-like and H-like iron emission lines at 6.7 and 6.97 \rm{keV} in the first order HETG spectrum. The detection of such ionized lines, indicative of a highly ionized surrounding medium, is rare in X-ray binaries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.06108,
  title  = {Multitude of iron lines including a Compton scattered component in OAO 1657--415 detected with Chandra},
  author = {Pragati Pradhan and Gayathri Raman and Biswajit Paul},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.06108},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

16 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS