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A Broadband Look at the Old and New ULXs of NGC 6946

Earnshaw, Hannah P.; Grefenstette, Brian W.; Brightman, Murray; Walton, Dominic J.; Barret, Didier; Furst, Felix; Harrison, Fiona A.; Heida, Marianne; Pike, Sean N.; Stern, Daniel; Webb, Natalie A.

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
2019
VL / 881 - BP / - EP /
abstract
Two recent observations of the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 with NuSTAR, one simultaneous with an XMM-Newton observation, provide an opportunity to examine its population of bright accreting sources from a broadband perspective. We study the three known ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in the galaxy, and find that ULX-1 and ULX-2 have very steep power-law spectra with Gamma = 3.6(-0.3)(+0.4) in both cases. Their properties are consistent with being super-Eddington accreting sources with the majority of their hard emission obscured and down-scattered. ULX-3 (NGC 6946 X-1) is significantly detected by both XMM-Newton and NuSTAR at L-X = (6.5 +/- 0.1) x 10(39) erg s(-1), and has a power-law spectrum with Gamma = 2.51 +/- 0.05. We are unable to identify a high-energy break in its spectrum like that found in other ULXs, but the soft spectrum likely hinders our ability to detect one. We also characterize the new source, ULX-4, which is only detected in the joint XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observation, at L-X = (2.27 +/- 0.07) x 10(39) erg s(-1), and is absent in a Chandra observation 10 days later. It has a very hard cutoff power-law spectrum with Gamma = 0.7 +/- 0.1 and E-cut = 11(-4)(+9) keV. We do not detect pulsations from ULX-4, but its transient nature can be explained either as a neutron star ULX briefly leaving the propeller regime or as a micro-tidal disruption event induced by a stellar-mass compact object.

AccesS level

Green accepted

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