Insight-HXMT observations of 4U~1636-536: Corona cooling revealed with single short type-I X-ray burst

TL;DR

This study uses Insight-HXMT to observe a single short type-I X-ray burst from 4U 1636-536, revealing corona cooling effects in hard X-rays and providing new insights into the corona's behavior during such bursts.

Contribution

First detection of corona cooling from a single short type-I burst using Insight-HXMT, advancing understanding of corona dynamics during X-ray bursts.

Findings

Corona hard X-ray shortage detected at 40-70 keV with 6.2σ significance.

Lag of 1.6 ± 1.2 seconds between burst emission and corona response.

Hard X-ray shortage appears at around 40 keV in the continuum spectrum.

Abstract

Corona cooling was detected previously from stacking a series of short type-I bursts occurred during the low/had state of atoll outburst. Type-I bursts are hence regarded as sharp probe to our better understanding on the basic property of the corona. The launch of the first Chinese X-ray satellite Insight-HXMT has large detection area at hard X-rays which provide almost unique chance to move further in this research field. We report the first detection of the corona cooling by Insight-HXMT from single short type-I burst showing up during {\bf flare} of 4U 1636-536. This type-I X-ray burst has a duration of $\sim$13 seconds and hard X-ray shortage is detected with significance 6.2~$\sigma$ in 40-70 keV. A cross-correlation analysis between the lightcurves of soft and hard X-ray band, shows that the corona shortage lag the burst emission by 1.6 $\pm$1.2~s. These results are consistent with those derived previously from stacking a large amount of bursts detected by RXTE/PCA within a series of {\bf flares} of 4U 1636-536. Moreover, the broad bandwidth of Insight-HXMT allows as well for the first time to infer the burst influence upon the continuum spectrum via performing the spectral fitting of the burst, which ends up with the finding that hard X-ray shortage appears at around 40 keV in the continuum spectrum. These results suggest that the evolution of the corona along with the outburst{\bf /flare} of NS XRB may be traced via looking into a series of embedded type-I bursts by using Insight-HXMT.