Diagnostics of SS433 with the RXTE

Free access article

Issue		A&A Volume 460, Number 1, December II 2006


Page(s)		125 - 131
Section		Interstellar and circumstellar matter
DOI		http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20054784

A&A 460, 125-131 (2006)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20054784

Diagnostics of SS433 with the RXTE

E. Filippova^{1, 2}, M. Revnivtsev^{1, 2}, S. Fabrika³, K. Postnov⁴, and E. Seifina⁴

¹ Max-Planck-Institute für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85740 Garching bei München, Germany
² Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Profsoyuznaya 84/32, 117997 Moscow, Russia
e-mail: kate@hea.iki.rssi.ru
³ Special Astrophysical Observatory, Nizhnij Arkhyz, Karachaevo-Cherkesiya 369167, Russia
⁴ Sternberg Astronomical Institute, 119992 Moscow, Russia

(Received 28 December 2005 / Accepted 24 August 2006)

Abstract
We present our analysis of the extensive monitoring of SS433 by the RXTE observatory collected over the period 1996-2005. The difference between energy spectra taken at different precessional and orbital phases shows the presence of strong photoabsorption ( $N_{\rm H}>10^{23}$ cm^-2) near the optical star, probably due to its powerful, dense wind. Therefore the size of the secondary deduced from analysis of X-ray orbital eclipses might be significantly larger than its Roche lobe size, which must be taken into account when evaluating the mass ratio from analysis of X-ray eclipses. Assuming that a precessing accretion disk is geometrically thick, we recover the temperature profile in the X-ray emitting jet that best fits the observed precessional variations in the X-ray emission temperature. The hottest visible part of the X-ray jet is located at a distance of $l_0/a\sim0.06{-}0.09$ , or ~ $2{-}3\times10^{11}$ cm from the central compact object, and has a temperature of about $T_{\rm max}\sim30$ keV. We discovered appreciable orbital X-ray eclipses at the "crossover" precessional phases (jets are in the plane of the sky, disk is edge-on), which under model assumptions put a lower limit on the size of the optical component $R/a\ga0.5$ and an upper limit on a mass ratio of binary companions $q=M_{\rm x}/M_{\rm opt}\la0.3{-}0.35$ , if the X-ray opaque size of the star is not larger than $1.2R_{\rm Roche, secondary}$ .

Key words: accretion, accretion disks -- black hole physics -- binaries: eclipsing -- X-rays: binaries -- radiation mechanisms: general

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