2013/03/01 by Qazuya Wada, Masahiro Tsujimoto, Ken Ebisawa +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/pasj/65.2.l2
published as 2013 PASJ · 5 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, 2013 PASJ accepted
arxiv created 2013/03/01 · arxiv updated 2015/06/15
During a routine calibration observation of 1E0102.2-7219 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) carried out in October 2012 for the Suzaku satellite, we detected a transient X-ray source at (RA, Dec) = (01h02m47s, -72d04m54s) in the equinox J2000.0 with a positional uncertainty of ~1"4. We conducted a temporal and spectral analysis of the source and found a coherent pulse signal with a period of 522.3 +/- 0.1 s, and a featureless spectrum described by a single power-law model with a photon index of 1.0 +/- 0.1 and a 0.5-10 keV luminosity of 8.8 x 1035 erg s-1 at an assumed distance of 60 kpc. The Suzaku source is likely to be the counterpart of 2XMMJ010247.4-720449, which has been observed several times, including during outburst by Swift. Based on the X-ray characteristics in our data, as well as the transient record and optical and near-infrared features in the literature, we conclude that this source is a high-mass X-ray binary pulsar with a Be star companion in the SMC, which is known to harbor an exceptionally large (80) number of such sources in comparison to our Galaxy.