[72.01] Accreting Compact Object at the Center of the Supernova Remnant RCW 103.

AAS 200th meeting, Albuquerque, NM, June 2002
Session 72. Degenerates
Display, Thursday, June 6, 2002, 9:20am-4:00pm, SW Exhibit Hall

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[72.01] Accreting Compact Object at the Center of the Supernova Remnant RCW 103.

D. Sanwal (Penn. State University), G. P. Garmire, A. Garmire, G. G. Pavlov (Penn. State Univerisity), R. Mignani (European Southern Observatory)

We observed the radio-quiet central compact object of the supernova remnant RCW 103 with the Chandra ACIS during 13.8 hours on 2002 March 3, when the source was in high state, with a time-averaged flux of 8\times10^-12 erg cm^-2 s^-1 in the 0.5--8.0 keV band. The complex light curve of the source shows a period of about 6.4 hours and two partial eclipses or dips per period, separated by 180^\circ in phase. The variability of the source proves that it is powered by accretion, likely from a low-mass companion in a binary system. Deep near-IR observations of the source with VLT suggest a potential counterpart of the compact object about 2'' from the nominal Chandra position. The magnitudes of the potential counterpart are J \approx 22.3, H \approx 19.6, and K_s \approx 18.5, with an uncertainty of about 0.5 mag. We will discuss possible interpretations of the observational results.

This work was partially supported by NASA grants NAS8-01128 and NAG5-10865.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: divas@astro.psu.edu

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