Echoes from an Irradiated Disc in GRO J1655-40

Preprint

2 June 1998

preprint
Published by arXiv in arXiv

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.astro-ph/9806038

Abstract

We demonstrate correlated rapid variability between the optical/UV and X-ray emission for the first time in a soft X-ray transient, GRO J1655-40: HST light curves show similar features to those seen by RXTE, but with mean delay of 10-20s. We interpret the correlations as due to reprocessing of X-rays into optical and UV emission, with a delay due to finite light travel time, and thus perform echo mapping of the system. The time-delay distribution has a mean of 14.6s +/- 1.4 and dispersion (i.e. the standard deviation of the distribution) of 10.5s +/- 1.9 at binary phase 0.4. Hence we identify the reprocessing region as the accretion disc rather than the mass donor star.

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Version 1, 1998-06-02, ArXiv
Published version: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 299 (4), L37.

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