NuSTAR Discovery of a cyclotron line in KS 1947+300
astro-ph.HE
/ Authors
Felix Fuerst, Katja Pottschmidt, Joern Wilms, Jamie Kennea, Matteo Bachetti, Eric Bellm, Steven E. Boggs, Deepto Chakrabarty, Finn E. Christensen, William W. Craig
and 42 more authors
Charles J. Hailey, Fiona Harrison, Daniel Stern1, John A. Tomsick, Dominic J. Walton, William Zhang, Cahill Center, Caltech, USA, CSST, UMBC, USA, CRESST, GSFC, USA, Remeis-Observatory, ECAP, Germany, Penn State University, USA, Universite de Toulouse, France, CNRS, IRAP, France
/ Abstract
We present a spectral analysis of three simultaneous NuSTAR and Swift/XRT observations of the transient Be-neutron star binary KS 1947+300 taken during its outburst in 2013/2014. These broad-band observations were supported by Swift/XRT monitoring snap-shots every 3 days, which we use to study the evolution of the spectrum over the outburst. We find strong changes of the power-law photon index, which shows a weak trend of softening with increasing X-ray flux. The neutron star shows very strong pulsations with a period of P ~ 18.8 s. The 0.8-79 keV broad-band spectrum can be described by a power-law with an exponential cutoff and a black-body component at low energies. During the second observation we detect a cyclotron resonant scattering feature at 12.5 keV, which is absent in the phase-averaged spectra of observations 1 and 3. Pulse phase-resolved spectroscopy reveals that the strength of the feature changes strongly with pulse phase and is most prominent during the broad minimum of the pulse profile. At the same phases the line also becomes visible in the first and third observation at the same energy. This discovery implies that KS 1947+300 has a magnetic field strength of B ~ 1.1e12 (1+z)G, which is at the lower end of known cyclotron line sources.