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Published July 20, 2014 | Version Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

NuSTAR Observations of X-Ray Bursts from the Magnetar 1E 1048.1–5937

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Abstract

We report the detection of eight bright X-ray bursts from the 6.5 s magnetar 1E 1048.1−5937, during a 2013 July observation campaign with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array. We study the morphological and spectral properties of these bursts and their evolution with time. The bursts resulted in count rate increases by orders of magnitude, sometimes limited by the detector dead time, and showed blackbody spectra with kT ~ 6–8 keV in the T_(90) duration of 1–4 s, similar to earlier bursts detected from the source. We find that the spectra during the tail of the bursts can be modeled with an absorbed blackbody with temperature decreasing with flux. The burst flux decays followed a power law of index 0.8–0.9. In the burst tail spectra, we detect a ~13 keV emission feature, similar to those reported in previous bursts from this source as well as from other magnetars observed with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. We explore possible origins of the spectral feature such as proton cyclotron emission, which implies a magnetic field strength of B ~ 2 × 10^(15) G in the emission region. However, the consistency of the energy of the feature in different objects requires further explanation.

Additional Information

© 2014 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 March 6; accepted 2014 June 12; published 2014 July 3. This work was supported under NASA Contract No. NNG08FD60C, and made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software and Calibration teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research has made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS) jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA). V.M.K. acknowledges support from an NSERC Discovery Grant, the FQRNT Centre de Recherche Astrophysique du Québec, an R. Howard Webster Foundation Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology. A.M.B. acknowledges the support by NASA grants NNX10AI72G and NNX13AI34G.

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Published - 0004-637X_790_1_60.pdf

Supplemental Material - 1406.3377v1.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
48597
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20140815-092605389

Related works

Describes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3377 (URL)

Funding

NASA
NNG08FD60C
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies (FQRNT)
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
Canada Research Chairs Program
Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology
NASA
NNX10AI72G
NASA
NNX13AI34G

Dates

Created
2014-08-22
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-10
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
NuSTAR, Space Radiation Laboratory
Other Numbering System Name
Space Radiation Laboratory
Other Numbering System Identifier
2014-46