English

Weak secondary cyclotron line in eclipsing High Mass X-ray Binary Cen X-3

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2023-11-27 v1

Abstract

We report the time resolved spectroscopy result from two observations of Cen X-3, over one binary orbit with ASTROSAT and two binary orbit with NuSTAR. NuSTAR covered two intensity states where the light curve showed transition in count rate from first to second binary orbit by a factor of \sim 3. A phenomenological model comprising of partially absorbed powerlaw with smoothed high energy cutoff, cyclotron absorption \sim 24 keV and 6.4 keV iron emission gave good fit for ASTROSAT observation. NuSTAR spectra required two additional emission components, a broad one \sim 5.7 keV and a narrow one \sim 6.9 keV. A weak secondary absorption feature at \sim 11.6 keV and \sim 14.5 keV was seen in the residuals of the spectral fit for ASTROSAT and NuSTAR data respectively. The secondary absorption energy showed no correlation with the cutoff energy. Its strength varied within 0.1 to 0.6 keV with its width \sim 1.6 keV. Its energy and optical depth showed linear positive correlation with the fundamental cyclotron line energy and depth respectively. The cyclotron line energy showed anti-correlation to flux described by a powerlaw with negative index and the secondary absorption also showed similar trend to flux. Depth of secondary absorption was \sim 45 \% and centroid energy was \sim 54 \% of fundamental. Depth and energy ratio of secondary to fundamental lied within 2σ\sigma deviation from 0.5. We suggest this secondary absorption to be a redshifted dipolar cyclotron resonance feature exhibiting sub-harmonic behaviour.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.13850,
  title  = {Weak secondary cyclotron line in eclipsing High Mass X-ray Binary Cen X-3},
  author = {Pravat Dangal and Ranjeev Misra and Nand Kumar Chakradhari and Yashpal Bhulla},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.13850},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:29:16.208Z