https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20136406012
Pulse-to-pulse variations in accreting X-ray pulsars
1 ESA/ESAC, Madrid, Spain
2 CRESST/UMBC, Baltimore, MD, USA
3 NASA-GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, USA
4 Dr. Karl Remeis-Observatory & ECAP, Bamberg, Germany
5 IAAT, Tübingen, Germany
6 NASA-MSFC, Huntsville, AL, USA
7 Univ. Alabama, Huntsville, AL, USA
8 AIM CEA Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
9 SRL Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA
a e-mail: peter.kretschmar@esa.int
Published online: 8 January 2014
In most accreting X-ray pulsars, the periodic signal is very clear and easily shows up as soon as data covering sufficient pulse periods (a few ten) are available. The mean pulse profile is often quite typical for a given source and with minor variations repeated and recognisable across observations done years or even decades apart. At the time scale of individual pulses, significant pulse-to-pulse variations are commonly observed. While at low energies some of these variations might be explained by absorption, in the hard X-rays they will reflect changes in the accretion and subsequent emission. The amount of these variations appears to be quite different between sources and contains information about the surrounding material as well ass possibly interactions at the magnetosphere. We investigate such variations for a sample of well-known sources.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2014
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
