Multitude of iron lines including a Compton scattered component in OAO 1657--415 detected with Chandra
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 6.3 keV associated with the neutral iron K 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 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 K, Fe and Ni 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