Long-term X-ray Variability of the Symbiotic System RT Cru based on Chandra Spectroscopy

Abstract

RT Cru belongs to the rare class of hard X-ray emitting symbiotics, whose origin is not yet fully understood. In this work, we have conducted a detailed spectroscopic analysis of X-ray emission from RT Cru based on observations taken by the Chandra Observatory using the Low Energy Transmission Grating (LETG) on the High-Resolution Camera Spectrometer (HRC-S) in 2015 and the High Energy Transmission Grating (HETG) on the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer S-array (ACIS-S) in 2005. Our thermal plasma modeling of the time-averaged HRC-S/LETG spectrum suggests a mean temperature of $kT\sim 1.3$ keV, whereas $kT\sim 9.6$ keV according to the time-averaged ACIS-S/HETG. The soft thermal plasma emission component ($\sim 1.3$ keV) found in the HRC-S is heavily obscured by dense materials ($>5\times 10^{23}$ cm${}^{-2}$). The aperiodic variability seen in its light curves could be due to changes in either absorbing material covering the hard X-ray source or intrinsic emission mechanism in the inner layers of the accretion disk. To understand the variability, we extracted the spectra in the "low/hard" and "high/soft" spectral states, which indicated higher plasma temperatures in the low/hard states of both the ACIS-S and HRC-S. The source also has a fluorescent iron emission line at 6.4 keV, likely emitted from reflection off an accretion disk or dense absorber, which was twice as bright in the HRC-S epoch compared to the ACIS-S. The soft thermal component identified in the HRC-S might be an indication of a jet that deserves further evaluations using high-resolution imaging observations.

28 pages, 18 figures, 4 tables, published in MNRAS

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