A study of the accretion mechanisms of the High Mass X-ray Binary IGR J00370+6122

Abstract

IGR J00370+6122 is a high-mass X-ray binary, of which the primary is a B1 Ib star, whereas the companion is suggested to be a neutron star by the detection of 346-s pulsation in one-off 4-ks observation. To better understand the nature of the compact companion, the present work performs timing and spectral studies of the X-ray data of this object, taken with XMM-Newton, Swift, Suzaku, RXTE, and INTEGRAL. In the XMM-Newton data, a sign of coherent 674 s pulsation was detected, for which the previous 346-s period may be the 2nd harmonic. The spectra exhibited the "harder when brighter" trend in the 1$-$10 keV range, and a flat continuum without clear cutoff in the 10$-$80 keV range. These properties are both similar to those observed from several low-luminosity accreting pulsars, including X Persei in particular. Thus, the compact object in IGR J00370+6122 is considered to be a magnetized neutron star with a rather low luminosity. The orbital period was refined to $15.6649\pm 0.0014$ d. Along the orbit, the luminosity changes by 3 orders of magnitude, involving a sudden drop from $\sim 4\times 10^{33}$ to $\sim 1\times 10^{32}$ erg s${}^{-1}$ at an orbital phase of 0.3 (and probably vice verse at 0.95). Although these phenomena cannot be explained by a simple Hoyle-Lyttleton accretion from the primary's stellar winds, they can be explained when incorporating the propeller effect with a strong dipole magnetic field of $\sim 5\times 10^{13}$ G. Therefore, the neutron star in IGR J00370+6122 may have a stronger magnetic field compared to ordinary X-ray pulsars.

29 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in PASJ

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Constraints to neutron-star kicks in High-Mass X-ray Binaries with Gaia EDR3
• SRG/eROSITA discovery of a radio faint X-ray candidate supernova remnant SRGe J003602.3+605421=G121.1-1.9