Photoionization Modeling of Oxygen K Absorption in the Interstellar Medium: The Chandra Grating Spectra of XTE J1817-330

We present detailed analyses of oxygen K absorption in the interstellar medium (ISM) using four high-resolution Chandra spectra toward the X-ray low-mass binary XTE J1817-330. The 11-25 Å broadband is described with a simple absorption model that takes into account the pile-up effect and results in an estimate of the hydrogen column density. The oxygen K-edge region (21-25 Å) is fitted with the physical warmabs model, which is based on a photoionization model grid generated with the XSTAR code with the most up-to-date atomic database. This approach allows a benchmark of the atomic data which involves wavelength shifts of both the K lines and photoionization cross sections in order to fit the observed spectra accurately. As a result we obtain a column density of N _H = 1.38 ± 0.01 × 10²¹ cm^-2 an ionization parameter of log ξ = -2.70 ± 0.023; an oxygen abundance of A_O= 0.689^{+0.015}_{-0.010}; and ionization fractions of O I/O = 0.911, O II/O = 0.077, and O III/O = 0.012 that are in good agreement with results from previous studies. Since the oxygen abundance in warmabs is given relative to the solar standard of Grevesse & Sauval, a rescaling with the revision by Asplund et al. yields A_O=0.952^{+0.020}_{-0.013}, a value close to solar that reinforces the new standard. We identify several atomic absorption lines—Kα, Kβ, and Kγ in O I and O II and Kα in O III, O VI, and O VII—the last two probably residing in the neighborhood of the source rather than in the ISM. This is the first firm detection of oxygen K resonances with principal quantum numbers n > 2 associated with ISM cold absorption.