Broadband spectrum of the total X-ray emission from the galaxy M31
: . G. Revnivtsev, R. A. Sunyaev, R. A. Krivonos, S. S. Tsygankov, S. V. Molkov
: 2014
: Astronomy Letters / Pis'ma v Astronomicheskii Zhurnal
: Astronomy Letters
: 40
: 1
: 22
: 28
: 7
: 1063-7737
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063773714010046
: http://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id:84891607305
We present the results of measurements of the total X-ray flux from the Andromeda galaxy (M31) in the 3-100 keV band based on data from the RXTE/PCA, INTEGRAL/ISGRI, and SWIFT/BAT space experiments. We show that the total emission from the galaxy has a multicomponent spectrum whose main characteristics are specified by binaries emitting in the optically thick and optically thin regimes. The galaxy's luminosity at energies 20-100 keV gives about 6% of its total luminosity in the 3-100 keV band. The emissivity of the stellar population in M31 is L ∼ 1.1 × 10 erg s M in the 2-20 keV band and L ∼ 8 × 10 erg s M in the 20-100 keV band. Since low-mass X-ray binaries at high luminosities pass into a soft state with a small fraction of hard X-ray emission, the detection of individual hard X-ray sources in M31 requires a sensitivity that is tens of times better (up to 10 erg s cm) than is needed to detect the total hard X-ray emission from the entire galaxy. Allowance for the contribution from the hard spectral component of the galaxy changes the galaxy's effective Compton temperature approximately by a factor of 2, from ∼1.1 to ∼2.1 keV. © 2014 Pleiades Publishing, Inc.