Discovery of a 7 Second Anomalous X-ray Pulsar in the Distant Milky Way

Abstract

We report the serendipitous discovery of a 7-s X-ray pulsar using data acquired with the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics. The pulsar is detected as an unresolved source located towards a region of the Galactic plane (l,b ~ 29.5, 0.08) that coincides with an overdensity of star-formation tracers. The signal suffers tremendous foreground absorption, equivalent to N_H ~ 10E23 cm^-2; the absorption correlates well with a line-of-sight that is tangential to the inner spiral arms and the 4-kpc molecular ring. The pulsar is not associated with any known supernova remnants or other cataloged objects in that direction. The near sinusoidal pulse (period P ~ 6.9712) is modulated at 35% pulsed amplitude, and the steep spectrum is characteristic of hot black-body emission with temperature kT ~ 0.65 keV. We characterize the source as an anomalous X-ray pulsar (AXP).

8 pages, latex, 4 figures, Accepted for publication in New Astronomy

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• The Discovery of an Anomalous X-ray Pulsar in the Supernova Remnant Kes 73
• Kes 73: A Young Supernova Remnant with an X-ray Bright, Radio-quiet Central Source
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