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AstroSat observation of rapid Type-I thermonuclear burst from the low mass X-ray binary GX 3+1

We report the results of an observation of low mass X-ray binary GX 3+1 with {\it AstroSat}'s Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) and Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) instruments on-board for the first time. We have detected one Type-1 thermonuclear burst (\(\sim\) 15 s) present in the LAXP...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2022-06
Main Authors: Nath, Ankur, Sarkar, Biplob, Roy, Jayashree, Misra, Ranjeev
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:We report the results of an observation of low mass X-ray binary GX 3+1 with {\it AstroSat}'s Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) and Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) instruments on-board for the first time. We have detected one Type-1 thermonuclear burst (\(\sim\) 15 s) present in the LAXPC 20 light curve, with a double peak feature at higher energies and our study of the hardness-intensity diagram reveals that the source was in a soft banana state. The pre-burst emission could be described well by a thermally Comptonised model component. The burst spectra is modelled adopting a time-resolved spectroscopic method using a single color blackbody model added to the pre-burst model, to monitor the parametric changes as the burst decays. Based on our time-resolved spectroscopy, we claim that the detected burst is a photospheric radius expansion (PRE) burst. During the PRE phase, the blackbody flux is found to be approximately constant at an averaged value \(\sim\) 2.56 in \(10^{-8}\) ergs s\(^{-1}\) cm\(^{-2}\) units. On the basis of literature survey, we infer that \textit{AstroSat}/LAXPC 20 has detected a burst from GX 3+1 after more than a decade which is also a PRE one. Utilising the burst parameters obtained, we provide a new estimation to the source distance, which is \(\sim\) 9.3 \(\pm\) 0.4 kpc, calculated for an isotropic burst emission. Finally, we discuss and compare our findings with the published literature reports.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2206.07450