English

Probing the shot behaviour in Cygnus X-1 using simultaneous AstroSat-NICER observation

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2022-04-06 v1

Abstract

We analyse the aperiodic flaring features, also known as shots, observed in Cyg X-1 in the 0.1-80 keV energy band using a 6.39 ks simultaneous observation with AstroSat and NICER. We detect 49 simultaneous shots in the soft and hard X-ray bands with NICER and AstroSat-LAXPC, respectively. We observe the shot profile for the first time in soft X-rays (0.1-3 keV), which shows a spectral peak at \sim2 keV. Using time-averaged spectroscopy, we measured the truncation of the inner accretion disk at 6.7±0.26.7\pm0.2 gravitational radii. The shot-phase resolved spectroscopy allowed us to identify the origin of some of the brightest aperiodic peaks in the soft X-rays. We find that the accretion rate is consistent with a constant during the shots while the inner edge of the accretion disk moves inwards/outwards as these shots rise/decay. We discuss the possible mechanisms causing the swing in the inner radius.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.11884,
  title  = {Probing the shot behaviour in Cygnus X-1 using simultaneous AstroSat-NICER observation},
  author = {Yash Bhargava and Nandini Hazra and A. R. Rao and Ranjeev Misra and Dipankar Bhattacharya and Jayashree Roy and Md. Shah Alam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.11884},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

12 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS