Pulsar discovered in the Andromeda galaxy by the OAR EXTraS team. For general (non-technical) information about this discovery, see here, for all the details see here.
Digging Up the Hidden
Modern soft X-ray observatories can yield unique insights into time domain astrophysics, and a huge amount of information is stored – and largely unexploited – in data archives.
The EXTraS project (Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky) will explore the temporal domain information buried in the serendipitous data collected by the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument onboard the ESA XMM-Newton mission in 13 yr of observations.
We will characterize the temporal domain information and release it to the community as a catalog of variable sources spanning more than eight orders of magnitude in time scale and six orders of magnitude in flux.
Our results will become the reference for time domain astrophysics in the soft X-ray band, until a future, dedicated mission is deployed.
At the Rome Astronomical Observatory GianLuca Israel and Guillermo Rodriguez investigate the periodic variability among millions of XMM-Newton sources:
The Beat of the EXTraS Sky
The detection and investigation of periodic phenomena have always played a major role in astronomy. This is particularly true when looking at the X-ray sky. In fact, in the 60’s, the detection of X-ray pulsations from Centaurus X-3 and of their properties as a function of time allowed scientists to identify the accretion of matter onto rotating compact objects (such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes) as a new and extremely efficient emission mechanism.
Since then, hundreds of X-ray pulsators have been discovered and today we know that many of the known X-ray periodic signals arise from the rotation of a compact star or the orbital motion in a binary system. Among these sources there are also different classes of isolated (not accreting) neutron stars. For the greatest part of the known X-ray pulsators the detection and accurate measurement of their X-ray coherent signals is the only way to infer information of paramount importance in order to characterize the compact object itself, such as the intensity of their magnetic fields, the object age, the system geometry, the matter torque, etc. Additionally, every time we looked for new coherent signals in the archival data of a new mission we found new classes of pulsating X-ray compact objects or we extended the flux/luminosity interval over which the physics of the accretion emission mechanism can be investigated.
In the last two decades the improvements of the instrument capabilities translated into an almost exponential increase of the number of detected sources. Systematic timing analysis carried out on the light curves of these sources enabled to discover and to study both new X-ray pulsators in very rare evolutionary phases and others which have became prototypes of new classes. As an example, the signal search in about 5,000 objects from the Einstein and EXOSAT data clearly showed that there is a number of soft X-ray pulsars with different properties from those of both accretion-driven and rotation-powered neutron stars: these objects are today known as Magnetars. The timing analysis of about 60,000 sources detected in the ROSAT archive led to the detection of X-ray modulations arising from the orbital motion of double degenerate ultrashort period binaries, hosting two white dwarfs (one of these systems possess the shortest orbital period known; see Figure 1). X-ray pulsations at a period of about 13s were also discovered in the ROSAT light curve of HD497985 in the post-common envelope evolutionary phase. The system likely hosts the most massive and fastest spinning white dwarf likely the first discovered system thought to evolve into a supernova Ia (Israel et al 1997 ApJ, 474, L53; Mereghetti et al 2009 Science, 325, 1222).
Fig. 1 – The X-ray sky in terms of detected sources by current X-ray missions (colors mark the numbers of source detections). Within the EXTraS project there is a working package aimed at searching for new coherent signals among about 400,000 time series. More than 100 new X-ray pulsators are expected to be detected as consequence of this effort. Insets show examples of power spectra and folded light curves obtained by means of the EPIC instruments.
Our capability of detecting X-ray signals is a strong function of the number of source photons, the observation length for uninterrupted pointings and the time resolution. In this respect the XMM EPIC data in imaging mode are the best we can rely upon (with respect to those of present and past missions) in order to maximize our signal search sensitivity owing to the unprecedented throughput, time resolution (in imaging mode) and to the long XMM orbit. With more than 400,000 time series in the archival data and more than 100 new X-ray pulsators expected to be detected in the EPIC frames, possibly also from object belonging to still unknown classes, EXTraS would represent the most powerful coherent signal discovery project ever carried out so far in high energy astrophysics (see Figure 1).
Results:
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G. Rodriguez et al. 2018, ApJ, 861, L26 “Discovery of a 3 s Spinning Neutron Star in a 4.15 hr Orbit in the Brightest Hard X-Ray Source in M31“
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G.L. Israel et al. 2017, MNRAS, 466, L48 “Discovery of a 0.42-s pulsar in the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 7793 P13“
- G.L. Israel et al. 2017, Science “An accreting pulsar with extreme properties drives an ultraluminous x-ray source in NGC 5907“
- F.Haberl et al. 2017, A&A “EXTraS discovery of two pulsators in the direction of the LMC: a Be/X-ray binary pulsar in the LMC and a candidate double-degenerate polar in the foreground“
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P. Esposito et al. 2016, MNRAS, 457, L5 “EXTraS discovery of an 1.2-s X-ray pulsar in M 31“
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