XMM-Newton and NuSTAR joint observation of the periodic Supergiant Fast X-ray Transient IGR J11215-5952
Abstract
IGRJ11215-5952 is the only Supergiant Fast X-ray Transient showing periodic outbursts (every 165 days, the orbital period of the system). The driving mechanism causing the transient X-ray emission in this sub-class of High Mass X-ray Binaries is still a matter of debate, after 10 years from the discovery of the class. To disentangle between magnetar-like neutron stars from models requiring more usual neutron star magnetic fields (1E12G), we observed the SFXT pulsar IGRJ11215-5952 with XMM-Newton coordinated with NuSTAR on 2016, February 14, during the expected peak of the outburst, for a net exposure time of 20 ks. The source was indeed caught in outburst (1E36 erg/s), with several bright flares repeating quasi-periodically with timescales of a few thousand seconds, spanning a dynamic range of two orders of magnitude. The overlapping observation with both XMM-Newton and NuSTAR enabled the study of the simultaneous broad band spectrum from 0.3 to 78 keV. The work is still in progress, given the extreme variability of the X-ray emission. X-ray pulsations were detected at 187.14 s, consistent with the last XMM-Newton observation, performed in 2007. We will discuss XMM+NuSTAR results in light of the different models proposed to explain the SFXTs behavior.
- Publication:
-
XMM-Newton: The Next Decade
- Pub Date:
- June 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016xnnd.confE..65S