Peculiar disk behaviors of the black hole candidate MAXI J1348-630 in the hard state observed by Insight-HXMT and Swift

TL;DR

This study analyzes the spectral evolution of the black hole candidate MAXI J1348-630 during its 2019 outburst, revealing unusual disk behaviors and suggesting a changing hardening factor indicative of disk condensation processes.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed spectral analysis of MAXI J1348-630 during outburst, highlighting anomalous disk behavior and proposing a variable hardening factor to explain these phenomena.

Findings

Canonical L ~ T_in^4 relation observed in soft states

Unusual inner radius and temperature trends during hard rise

Evidence for evolving hardening factor from ~3.5 to 1.7

Abstract

We present a spectral study of the black hole candidate MAXI J1348-630 during its 2019 outburst, based on monitoring observations with Insight-HXMT and Swift. Throughout the outburst, the spectra are well fitted with power-law plus disk-blackbody components. In the soft-intermediate and soft states, we observed the canonical relation L ~ T_in^4 between disk luminosity L and peak colour temperature T_in, with a constant inner radius R_in (traditionally identified with the innermost stable circular orbit). At other stages of the outburst cycle, the behaviour is more unusual, inconsistent with the canonical outburst evolution of black hole transients. In particular, during the hard rise, the apparent inner radius is smaller than in the soft state (and increasing), and the peak colour temperature is higher (and decreasing). This anomalous behaviour is found even when we model the spectra with self-consistent Comptonization models, which take into account the up-scattering of photons from the disk component into the power-law component. To explain both those anomalous trends at the same time, we suggest that the hardening factor for the inner disk emission was larger than the canonical value of ~1.7 at the beginning of the outburst. A more physical trend of radii and temperature evolution requires a hardening factor evolving from ~3.5 at the beginning of the hard state to ~1.7 in the hard intermediate state. This could be evidence that the inner disk was in the process of condensing from the hot, optically thin medium and had not yet reached a sufficiently high optical depth for its emission spectrum to be described by the standard optically-thick disk solution.