English

Phase-resolved NuSTAR and Swift-XRT Observations of Magnetar 4U 0142+61

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-08-06 v1

Abstract

We present temporal and spectral analysis of simultaneous 0.5-79 keV Swift-XRT and NuSTAR observations of the magnetar 4U 0142+61. The pulse profile changes significantly with photon energy between 3 and 35 keV. The pulse fraction increases with energy, reaching a value of ~20%, similar to that observed in 1E 1841-045 and much lower than the ~80% pulse fraction observed in 1E 2259+586. We do not detect the 55-ks phase modulation reported in previous Suzaku-HXD observations. The phase-averaged spectrum of 4U 0142+61 above 20 keV is dominated by a hard power law with a photon index, Γ\Gamma ~ 0.65, and the spectrum below 20 keV can be described by two blackbodies, a blackbody plus a soft power law, or by a Comptonized blackbody model. We study the full phase-resolved spectra using the electron-positron outflow model of Beloborodov (2013). Our results are consistent with the parameters of the active j-bundle derived from INTEGRAL data by Hascoet et al. (2014). We find that a significant degeneracy appears in the inferred parameters if the footprint of the j-bundle is allowed to be a thin ring instead of a polar cap. The degeneracy is reduced when the footprint is required to be the hot spot inferred from the soft X-ray data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.03098,
  title  = {Phase-resolved NuSTAR and Swift-XRT Observations of Magnetar 4U 0142+61},
  author = {Shriharsh P. Tendulkar and Romain Hascöet and Chengwei Yang and Victoria M. Kaspi and Andrei M. Beloborodov and Hongjun An and Matteo Bachetti and Steven E. Boggs and Finn E. Christensen and William W. Craig and Sebastien Guillot and Charles A. Hailey and Fiona A. Harrison and Daniel Stern and William Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.03098},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

14 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ