Photospheric Radius Expansion and a double-peaked type-I X-ray burst from GRS 1741.9-2853

Abstract

We present analysis of two type-I X-ray bursts observed by NuSTAR originating from the very faint transient neutron star low-mass X-ray binary GRS 1741.9-2853 during a period of outburst in May 2020. We show that the persistent emission can be modeled as an absorbed, Comptonized blackbody in addition to Fe K$\alpha$ emission which can be attributed to relativistic disk reflection. We measure a persistent bolometric, unabsorbed luminosity of $L_{\mathrm{bol}}=7.03_{-0.05}^{+0.04}\times 10^{36}\mathrm{erg}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$, assuming a distance of 7 kpc, corresponding to an Eddington ratio of $4.5\%$. This persistent luminosity combined with light curve analysis leads us to infer that the bursts were the result of pure He burning rather than mixed H/He burning. Time-resolved spectroscopy reveals that the bolometric flux of the first burst exhibits a double-peaked structure, placing the source within a small population of accreting neutron stars which exhibit multiple-peaked type-I X-ray bursts. We find that the second, brighter burst shows evidence for photospheric radius expansion (PRE) and that at its peak, this PRE event had an unabsorbed bolometric flux of $F_{\mathrm{peak}}=2.94_{-0.26}^{+0.28}\times 10^{-8}\mathrm{erg}\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{m}}^{-2}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$. This yields a new distance estimate of $d=9.0\pm 0.5$ kpc, assuming that this corresponds to the Eddington limit for pure He burning on the surface of a canonical neutron star. Additionally, we performed a detailed timing analysis which failed to find evidence for quasiperiodic oscillations or burst oscillations, and we place an upper limit of $16\%$ on the rms variability around 589 Hz, the frequency at which oscillations have previously been reported.

arXiv comment15 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

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