The Long Term Stability of Oscillations During Thermonuclear X-ray Bursts: Constraining the Binary X-ray Mass Function

Abstract

We report on the long term stability of the millisecond oscillations observed with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) during thermonuclear X-ray bursts from the low mass X-ray binaries (LMXB) 4U 1728-34 and 4U 1636-53. We show that bursts from 4U 1728-34 spanning more than 1.5 years have observed asymptotic oscillation periods which are within 0.2 microsec. of each other, well within the magnitude which could be produced by the orbital motion of the neutron star in a typical LMXB. This stability implies a timescale to change the oscillation period of > 23,000 years, suggesting a highly stable process such as stellar rotation as the oscillation mechanism. We show that period offsets in three distinct bursts from 4U 1636-53 can be plausibly interpreted as due to orbital motion of the neutron star in this 3.8 hour binary system. We discuss the constraints on the mass function which can in principle be derived using this technique.

arXiv comment11 pages, 4 figures. AASTeX, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters

References in corpus (3)

• RXTE Discovery of Coherent Millisecond Pulsations during an X-ray Burst from KS 1731-260
• Milli-second Oscillations in the Persistent and Bursting Flux of Aql X-1 During an Outburst
• Rapid Rotation and Nonradial Pulsations: Kappa-Mechanism Excitation of G-Modes in B Stars

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