Bursting behavior of the Galactic Center faint X-ray transient GRS 1741.9-2853

Abstract

The neutron star low-mass X-ray binary GRS 1741.9-2853 is a known type-I burster of the Galactic Center. It is transient, faint, and located in a very crowded region, only 10 arcmin from the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. Therefore, its bursting behavior has been poorly studied so far. In particular, its persistent emission has rarely been detected between consecutive bursts, due to lack of sensitivity or confusion. This is what made GRS 1741.9-2853 one of the nine "burst-only sources" identified by BeppoSAX a few years ago. The physical properties of GRS 1741.9-2853 bursts are yet of great interest since we know very little about the nuclear regimes at stake in low accretion rate bursters. We examine here for the first time several bursts in relation with the persistent emission of the source, using INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton, and Swift observations. We investigate the source flux variability and bursting behavior during its 2005 and 2007 long outbursts. The persistent luminosity of GRS 1741.9-2853 varied between ~1.7 and 10.5 10^36 erg s^-1, i.e. 0.9-5.3% of the Eddington luminosity. The shape of the spectrum as described by an absorbed power-law remained with a photon index Gamma ~ 2 and a column density $N_{\rm H} ~ 12 10^22 cm^-2 throughout the outbursts. We discovered 11 type-I bursts with INTEGRAL, and inspected 4 additional bursts: 2 recorded by XMM-Newton and 2 by Swift. From the brigthest burst, we derive an upper limit on the source distance of ~7 kpc. The observed bursts characteristics and source accretion rate suggest pure helium explosions igniting at column depths y_{ign} ~ 0.8-4.8 10^8 g cm^-1, for typical energy releases of ~1.2-7.4 10^39 erg.

11 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• The XMM-Newton view of the central degrees of the Milky Way
• A four-year baseline Swift study of enigmatic X-ray transients located near the Galactic center
• A four-year XMM-Newton/Chandra monitoring campaign of the Galactic Centre: analysing the X-ray transients
• NuSTAR observation of a Type I X-ray burst from GRS 1741.9-2853
• The Galactic LMXB Population and the Galactic Centre Region
• INTEGRAL, Swift, and RXTE observations of the 518 Hz accreting transient pulsar Swift J1749.4-2807
• Searching for the most powerful thermonuclear X-ray bursts with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory
• Soft gamma-ray constraints on a bright flare from the Galactic Center supermassive black hole
• Two new bursting neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries: Swift J185003.2-005627 and Swift J1922.7-1716
• The X-ray bursts within the 2010 outburst of the accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar SAX J1748.9-2021
• Photospheric Radius Expansion and a double-peaked type-I X-ray burst from GRS 1741.9-2853