Spectral and timing evolution of the bright failed outburst of the transient black hole Swift J174510.8-262411

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spectral and timing evolution of the bright failed outburst of the black hole transient Swift J174510.8-262411, revealing it remained in the hard/intermediate state with no transition to soft state, despite high brightness.

Contribution

It provides detailed spectral and timing analysis of a failed outburst, highlighting the physical parameters and evolution consistent with a truncated-disc model in a bright black hole transient.

Findings

Source remained in hard/intermediate state with QPOs present.

Spectral evolution driven by increased soft photon flux, not electron heating.

Non-thermal Comptonisation contributes ~59% to plasma power.

Abstract

We studied time variability and spectral evolution of the Galactic black hole transient Swift J174510.8-262411 during the first phase of its outburst. INTEGRAL and Swift observations collected from 2012 September 16 until October 30 have been used. The total squared fractional rms values did not drop below 5% and QPOs, when present, were type-C, indicating that the source never made the transition to the soft-intermediate state. Even though the source was very bright (up to 1 Crab in hard X-rays), it showed a so called failed outburst as it never reached the soft state. XRT and IBIS broad band spectra, well represented by a hybrid thermal/non-thermalComptonisationmodel, showed physical parameters characteristic of the hard and intermediate states. In particular, the derived temperature of the geometrically thin disc black body was about 0.6 keV at maximum.We found a clear decline of the optical depth of the corona electrons (close to values of 0.1), as well as of the total compactness ratio lh/ls. The hard-to-hard/intermediate state spectral transition is mainly driven by the increase in the soft photon flux in the corona, rather than small variations of the electron heating. This, associated with the increasing of the disc temperature, is consistent with a disc moving towards the compact object scenario, i.e. the truncated-disc model. Moreover, this scenario is consistent with the decreasing fractional squared rms and increasing of the noise and QPO frequency. In our final group of observations, we found that the contribution from the non-thermal Comptonisation to the total power supplied to the plasma is 0.59+0.02/-0.05 and that the thermal electrons cool to kTe<26 keV.