English

Signatures of Intra-binary shock emission in the black widow pulsar binary PSR J2241-5236

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2018-11-28 v1

Abstract

We report on high-energy properties of the black widow pulsar PSR J2241-5236 in the X-ray and the Fermi-LAT (GeV gamma-ray) bands. In the LAT band, the phase-averaged gamma-ray light curve shows orbital modulation below \sim1 GeV with a chance probability (pp) monotonically decreasing with time to p105p\sim 10^{-5}. The peak of the light curve is near the superior conjunction of the pulsar (binary phase ϕB0.25\phi_{\rm B}\approx 0.25). We attribute the modulation to the intra-binary shock (IBS) emission and search for IBS signatures in the archival X-ray data. We find that the X-ray spectral fit requires a non-thermal component, which implies a possible IBS origin of the X-rays. We discuss our observations in the context of IBS scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.13055,
  title  = {Signatures of Intra-binary shock emission in the black widow pulsar binary PSR J2241-5236},
  author = {Hongjun An and Roger W. Romani and Matthew Kerr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.13055},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in ApJL. 5 pages 2 figures