Investigation of the High-Energy Emission from the Magnetar-like Pulsar PSR J1119-6127 after the 2016 Outburst

TL;DR

This study comprehensively analyzes the high-energy emission and magnetospheric changes of the magnetar-like pulsar PSR J1119-6127 following its 2016 outburst, revealing thermal, non-thermal, and timing evolution across multiple wavelengths.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed multi-wavelength investigation of PSR J1119-6127's post-outburst behavior, linking spectral, timing, and emission changes to magnetospheric reconfiguration.

Findings

Thermal regions heated to >1 keV persisted for months.

Hard X-ray pulsations detected immediately after outburst, then disappeared.

Gamma-ray and radio emissions were suppressed post-outburst.

Abstract

PSR J1119-6127 is a radio pulsar that behaved magnetar like bursts, and we performed a comprehensive investigation of this pulsar using the archival high-energy observations obtained after its outburst in 2016 July. After the 2016 outburst, specific regions on the neutron star surface were heated up to > 0.3 and > 1 keV from about 0.2 keV. A hard non-thermal spectral component with a photon index < 0.5 related to the magnetospheric emission can be resolved from the NuSTAR spectra above 10 keV. We find that the thermal emitting regions did not cool down and gradually shrank by about (20-35)% four months after the outburst. Hard X-ray pulsations were detected with NuSTAR immediately after the outburst, at 5 sigma confidence level and with a background-subtracted pulsed fraction of (40+-10)%. However, the signal became undetectable after a few days. Using Fermi data, we found that the gamma-ray emission in 0.5-300 GeV was suppressed along with the disappearance of the radio pulsations. This is likely caused by a reconfiguration of the magnetic field. We also discovered that the timing noise evolved dramatically, and the spin-down rate significantly increased after the 2016 glitch. We proposed that post-outburst temporal and spectral behaviors from radio to gamma-ray bands were caused by changes of the magnetosphere structure, pair plasma injection and the shrinking emission sites on the neutron star.