A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Complex rotational dynamics of the neutron star in Hercules X-1 revealed by X-ray polarization
Authors: Heyl, Jeremy; Doroshenko, Victor; González-Caniulef, Denis; Caiazzo, Ilaria; Poutanen, Juri; Mushtukov, Alexander; Tsygankov, Sergey S.; Kirmizibayrak, Demet; Bachetti, Matteo; Pavlov, George G.; Forsblom, Sofia V.; Malacaria, Christian; Suleimanov, Valery F.; Agudo, Iván; Antonelli, Lucio Angelo; Baldini, Luca; Baumgartner, Wayne H.; Bellazzini, Ronaldo; Bianchi, Stefano; Bongiorno, Stephen D.; Bonino, Raffaella; Brez, Alessandro; Bucciantini, Niccolò; Capitanio, Fiamma; Castellano, Simone; Cavazzuti, Elisabetta; Chen, Chien-Ting; Ciprini, Stefano; Costa, Enrico; De Rosa, Alessandra; Del Monte, Ettore; Di Gesu, Laura; Di Lalla, Niccolò; Di Marco, Alessandro; Donnarumma, Immacolata; Dovčiak, Michal; Ehlert, Steven R.; Enoto, Teruaki; Evangelista, Yuri; Fabiani, Sergio; Ferrazzoli, Riccardo; Garcia, Javier A.; Gunji, Shuichi; Hayashida, Kiyoshi; Iwakiri, Wataru; Jorstad, Svetlana G.; Kaaret, Philip; Karas, Vladimir; Kislat, Fabian; Kitaguchi, Takao; Kolodziejczak, Jeffery J.; Krawczynski, Henric; La Monaca, Fabio; Latronico, Luca; Liodakis, Ioannis; Maldera, Simone; Manfreda, Alberto; Marin, Frédéric; Marinucci, Andrea; Marscher, Alan P.; Marshall, Herman L.; Massaro, Francesco; Matt, Giorgio; Mitsuishi, Ikuyuki; Mizuno, Tsunefumi; Muleri, Fabio; Negro, Michela; Ng, C.-Y.; O’Dell, Stephen L.; Omodei, Nicola; Oppedisano, Chiara; Papitto, Alessandro; Peirson, Abel Lawrence; Perri, Matteo; Pesce-Rollins, Melissa; Petrucci, Pierre-Olivier; Pilia, Maura; Possenti, Andrea; Puccetti, Simonetta; Ramsey, Brian D.; Rankin, John; Ratheesh, Ajay; Roberts, Oliver J.; Romani, Roger W.; Sgrò, Carmelo; Slane, Patrick; Soffitta, Paolo; Spandre, Gloria; Swartz, Douglas A.; Tamagawa, Toru; Tavecchio, Fabrizio; Taverna, Roberto; Tawara, Yuzuru; Tennant, Allyn F.; Thomas, Nicholas E.; Tombesi, Francesco; Trois, Alessio; Turolla, Roberto; Vink, Jacco; Weisskopf, Martin C.; Wu, Kinwah; Xie, Fei; Zane, Silvia
Publisher: MacMillan Publishers
Publishing place: BERLIN
Publication year: 2024
Journal: Nature Astronomy
Journal name in source: NATURE ASTRONOMY
Journal acronym: NAT ASTRON
Volume: 8
First page : 1047
Last page: 1053
Number of pages: 12
eISSN: 2397-3366
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02295-8
Web address : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02295-8
Preprint address: https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2887498/v1_covered_a0c696aa-95fe-43cc-8af6-fdce65a6137e.pdf?c=1718780740
In an accreting X-ray pulsar, a neutron star accretes matter from a companion star through an accretion disk. The magnetic field of the rotating neutron star disrupts the inner edge of the disk, funnelling the gas to flow onto the poles on its surface. Hercules X-1 is a prototypical persistent X-ray pulsar about 7 kpc from Earth. Its emission varies on three distinct timescales: the neutron star rotates every 1.2 s, it is eclipsed by its companion each 1.7 d, and the system exhibits a superorbital period of 35 d, which has remained stable since its discovery. Several lines of evidence point to the source of this variation as the precession of the accretion disk or that of the neutron star. Despite the many hints over the past 50 yr, the precession of the neutron star itself has yet not been confirmed or refuted. X-ray polarization measurements (probing the spin geometry of Her X-1) with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer suggest that free precession of the neutron star crust sets the 35 d period; this has the important implication that its crust is somewhat asymmetric by a few parts per ten million.IXPE has revealed how the spin of the accreting neutron star Hercules X-1 changes in three dimensions. The spin axis of the star moves both through the star and across the sky, hinting that the crust of the star is asymmetric by almost one part in a million.
Funding information in the publication:
IXPE is a joint US and Italian mission. The US contribution is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and led and managed by its Marshall Space Flight Center, with industry partner Ball Aerospace (Contract NNM15AA18C). The Italian contribution is supported by the Italian Space Agency (Contract ASI-ASI-OHBI-2022-13-I.0 and Agreements ASI-INAF-2022-19-HH.0 and ASI-INFN-2017.13-H0) and its Space Science Data Center (Agreements ASI-INAF-2022-14-HH.0 and ASI-INFN 2021-43-HH.0), and by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. This research used data products provided by the IXPE Team (Marshall Space Flight Center, Space Science Data Center, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics) and distributed with additional software tools by the High-Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. J.H. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through a discovery grant, the Canadian Space Agency through the co-investigator grant program, and computational resources and services provided by Compute Canada, Advanced Research Computing at the University of British Columbia, and the SciServer science platform (www.sciserver.org). D.G.-C. acknowledges support from a fellowship grant from the French National Centre for Space Studies. J.P. and S.S.T. were supported by the Academy of Finland (Grant Nos. 333112 and 349144) and the Väisälä Foundation. V.D. and V.F.S. thank the German Academic Exchange Service (Travel Grant No. 57525212). We used Astropy (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core Python package and an ecosystem of tools and resources for astronomy.
