In-flight Calibration of Hitomi Soft X-ray Spectrometer (3) Effective Area

Abstract

We present the result of the in-flight calibration of the effective area of the Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS) onboard the Hitomi X-ray satellite using an observation of the Crab nebula. We corrected for the artifacts when observing high count rate sources with the X-ray microcalorimeter. We then constructed a spectrum in the 0.5-20 keV band, which we modeled with a single power-law continuum attenuated by an interstellar extinction. We evaluated the systematic uncertainty upon the spectral parameters by various calibration items. In the 2-12 keV band, the SXS result is consistent with the literature values in flux (2.20 $\pm$ 0.08) $\times$10${}^{-8}$ erg s${}^{-1}$ cm${}^{-2}$ with a 1$\sigma$ statistical uncertainty) but is softer in the power-law index (2.19 $\pm$ 0.11). The discrepancy is attributable to the systematic uncertainty of about $+$6/$-$7% and $+$2/$-$5% respectively for the flux and the power-law index. The softer spectrum is affected primarily by the systematic uncertainty of the Dewar gate valve transmission and the event screening.

13 pages, 7 figures.PASJ accepted

References in corpus (5)

• When A Standard Candle Flickers
• Broadband X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy of the Crab Nebula and Pulsar with NuSTAR
• Effective area calibration of the Reflection Grating Spectrometers of XMM-Newton. I. X-ray spectroscopy of the Crab nebula
• Hitomi X-ray studies of Giant Radio Pulses from the Crab pulsar
• Inflight Calibration of the Hitomi Soft X-ray Spectrometer (2) Point Spread Function

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• Temperature Structure in the Perseus Cluster Core Observed with Hitomi
• Search for Thermal X-ray Features from the Crab nebula with Hitomi Soft X-ray Spectrometer
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• Hitomi X-ray Observation of the Pulsar Wind Nebula G21.5$-$0.9
• Simulation-based spectral analysis of X-ray CCD data affected by photon pile-up
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