* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: 1E 1547.0-5408

Blobrana · L

Title: RXTE Observations of Anomalous X-ray Pulsar 1E 1547.0-5408 During and After its 2008 and 2009 Outbursts
Authors: Rim Dib, Victoria M. Kaspi, Paul Scholz, Fotis P. Gavriil

We present the results of Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) and Swift monitoring observations of the magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 following the pulsar's radiative outbursts in 2008 October and 2009 January. We report on a study of the evolution of the timing properties and the pulsed flux from 2008 October 4 through 2009 December 26. We show that the pulsed flux decrease which followed an initial rise in the 2008 outburst was interrupted by a spike ~9 days after the initial outburst. In our timing study, a phase-coherent analysis shows that for the first 29 days following the 2008 outburst, there was a very fast increase in the magnitude of the rotational frequency derivative nudot, such that the second derivative was a factor of ~60 larger than that reported in data from 2007. This nudot magnitude increase occurred in concert with the decay of the pulsed flux following the start of the 2008 event. Following the 2009 outburst, for the first 23 days, the second derivative was consistent with zero, and nudot had returned to close to its 2007 value. In contrast to the 2008 event, the 2009 outburst showed a major increase in persistent flux, relatively little change in the pulsed flux, and sudden significant spectral hardening ~15 days after the outburst. We show that, excluding the month following each of the outbursts, and because of the noise and the sparsity in the data, multiple plausible timing solutions fit the pulsar's frequency behaviour. We note similarities in the behaviour of 1E 1547.0-5408 following the 2008 outburst to that seen in the AXP 1E 1048.1-5937 following its 2001-2002 outburst and discuss this in terms of the magnetar model.

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Blobrana · L

Title: VLT/NACO near-infrared observations of the transient radio magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408
Authors: R. P. Mignani, N. Rea, V. Testa, G.L. Israel, G. Marconi, S. Mereghetti, P. Jonker, R. Turolla, R. Perna, S. Zane, G. Lo Curto, S. Chaty

Despite about a decade of observations, very little is known about the optical and infrared (IR) emission properties of the Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs) and of the Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs), the magnetar candidates, and about the physical processes which drive their emission at these wavelengths. This is mainly due to the limited number of identifications achieved so far, five in total, and to the sparse spectral coverage obtained from multi-band optical/IR photometry. Aim of this work is to search for a likely candidate counterpart to the recently discovered transient radio AXP 1E 1547.0-5408. We performed the first deep near-IR (NIR) observations (Ks band) of 1E 1547.0-5408 with the VLT on three nights (July 8th, 12th, and August 17th), after the X-ray source rebrightening and during the subsequent decay reported around June 2007. We detected four objects within, or close to, the 3sigma radio position of 1E 1547.0-5408. The faintest of them (object 1) has a brightness K = 20.27 ±0.05, which would yield an unabsorbed X-ray to NIR flux ratio FX/FKs ~ 800 for 1E 1547.0-5408, i.e. on average lower than those derived for other magnetars. The non-detection of object 1 on the nights of July 8th and August 17th only allowed us to set an upper limit of Delta Ks ~ 0.2 on its NIR variability, which prevented us to search for correlations with the radio or X-ray flux. We detected no other object at the radio position down to a limit of Ks ~ 21.7 (at 5sigma), computed in our deepest VLT image (July 12th). From our observations we can not confidently propose a NIR counterpart to 1E 1547.0-5408. More NIR observations of object 1, e.g. to determine its colours and to monitor variability, would be conclusive to determine whether or not it can be considered a plausible candidate.

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