2003-2019 Monitoring of the Crab emission through INTEGRAL SPI, or vice versa

TL;DR

This study analyzes 17 years of INTEGRAL SPI data to assess the Crab Nebula's flux stability and spectral shape, confirming its suitability as a calibration source and demonstrating instrument stability over time.

Contribution

It provides a long-term analysis of Crab emission stability and spectral characteristics, and confirms the SPI instrument's efficiency remains within 5% after 17 years.

Findings

Crab flux variability is within +/- 5% over 20 years.

Spectral shape fits a Band model with specific parameters.

SPI instrument efficiency remains within 5% after 17 years.

Abstract

The Crab Nebula is used by many instruments as a calibration source, in particular at high energy, where it is one of the brightest celestial object. The spectrometer INTEGRAL SPI (20 keV - 8 MeV), in operation since October 2002, offers a large dataset dedicated to this source, with regular campaigns planned twice per year. We have analyzed the available data to quantify the source behavior on a long term scale and examine the stability level on timescales from hour to years. As a result, the source flux variability appears to be contained within less than +/- 5% around a ~ 20 yr mean value, for broad bands covering the 20 keV - 400 keV energy domain, above which statistic limits any firm conclusion. In term of spectral shape, the Band model provides a good description of the observed emission between 20 keV and 2.2 MeV. The averaged spectrum best fit parameters correspond to a low energy slope of 1.99 +/- 0.01, a high energy slope of -2.32 +/- 0.02 and a characteristic energy E c of 531 +/- 50 keV to describe the curvature joining both power laws. The spectral parameters have then been determined on the revolution timescale (~ 1 to 2 days) and their steadiness confirms the source emission stability. As a complementary result, this study demonstrates that the SPI instrument efficiency remains within 5% of its initial value, after 17 years of operation.