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 ∼1 GeV with a chance probability (p) monotonically decreasing with time to p∼10−5. The peak of the light curve is near the superior conjunction of the pulsar (binary phase ϕB≈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.
@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