The black-hole candidate XTE J1817-330 as seen by XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL

The new black hole candidate XTE J1817-330, discovered on 26 January 2006 with RXTE, was observed with XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL in February and March 2006, respectively. The X-ray spectrum is dominated by the thermal emission of the accretion disk in the soft band, with a low absorption column density (N_H=1.77(±0.01)×10²¹ cm^‑2) and a maximum disk temperature kT_max=0.68(±0.01) keV, plus a power law component, with the photon index decreasing from 2.66±0.02 to 1.98±0.07 between the two observations. Several interstellar absorption lines are detected in the X-ray spectrum, corresponding to O I, O II, O III, O VII and Fe XXIV. We constrain the distance to the system to be in the range 1–5 kpc.