Search for gamma-ray emission from AE Aquarii with seven years of FERMI-LAT observations

Abstract

AE Aquarii (AE Aqr) is a cataclysmic binary hosting one of the fastest rotating (P${}_{\mathrm{spin}}$ = 33.08 s) white dwarfs known. Based on seven years of Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Pass 8 data, we report on a deep search for gamma-ray emission from AE Aqr. Using X-ray observations from ASCA, XMM-Newton, Chandra, Swift, Suzaku, and NuSTAR, spanning 20 years, we substantially extend and improve the spin ephemeris of AE Aqr. Using this ephemeris, we searched for gamma-ray pulsations at the spin period of the white dwarf. No gamma-ray pulsations were detected above 3 $\sigma$ significance. Neither phase-averaged gamma-ray emission nor gamma-ray variability of AE Aquarii is detected by Fermi-LAT. We impose the most restrictive upper limit to the gamma-ray flux from AE Aqr to date: $1.3\times 10^{-12}$ erg cm${}^{-2}$ s${}^{-1}$ in the 100 MeV-300 GeV energy range, providing constraints on models.

arXiv comment16 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Accepted for publication in ApJ

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• Evidence for Gamma-Ray Pulsations from the Classical Nova ASASSN-16ma
• Discovery of a magnetar candidate X-ray pulsar in the Large Magellanic Cloud