Type-I X-ray bursts reveal a fast co-evolving behavior of the corona in an X-ray binary
Abstract
The coronae in X-ray binaries (XRBs) still remain poorly understood, although they have been believed for a long time to play a key role in modeling the characteristic outbursts of XRBs. Type-I X-ray bursts, the thermonuclear flashes happening on the surface of a neutron star (NS), can be used as a probe to the innermost region of a NS XRB, where the corona is believed to be located very close to the NS. We report the discovery of a tiny life cycle of the corona that is promptly co-evolved with the type-I bursts superimposed on the outburst of the NS XRB IGR J174732721. This finding may serve as the first evidence of directly seeing the rapid disappearance and formation of a corona in an XRB with a cooling/heating timescale of less than a second, which can strongly constrain the accretion models in XRBs at work.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1304.5370,
title = {Type-I X-ray bursts reveal a fast co-evolving behavior of the corona in an X-ray binary},
author = {Yu-Peng Chen and Shu Zhang and Shuang-Nan Zhang and Jian Li and Jian-Min Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.5370},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
The Astrophysical Journal, 2012, 752, L34