Insight-HXMT observation on 4U~1608--52: evidence of interplay between thermonuclear burst and accretion environments

TL;DR

This study uses Insight-HXMT observations of a bright PRE burst from 4U 1608-52 to explore how thermonuclear bursts interact with and influence the surrounding accretion environment, revealing complex spectral behaviors.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the interplay between thermonuclear bursts and accretion processes by analyzing time-resolved spectra with advanced Comptonization models.

Findings

Enhanced pre-burst emission or Comptonization observed

NS surface emission shows a plateau and rise during burst

Obscured NS surface exposed due to inner disk evaporation

Abstract

A type-I burst could influence the accretion process through radiation pressure and Comptonization both for the accretion disk and the corona/boundary layer of an X-ray binary, and vice versa. We investigate the temporal evolution of a bright photospheric radius expansion (PRE) burst of 4U 1608-52 detected by Insight-HXMT in 1-50 keV, with the aim of studying the interplay between the burst and persistent emission. Apart from the emission from the neutron star (NS) surface, we find the residuals both in the soft (<3 keV) and hard (>10 keV) X-ray band. Time-resolved spectroscopy reveals that the excess can be attributed to an enhanced pre-burst/persistent emission or the Comptonization of the burst emission by the corona/boundary layer. The Comptonization model is a convolution thermal-Comptonization model (thcomp in XSPEC) and the Comptonization parameters are fixed at the values derived from the persistent emission. We find, during the PRE phase, after the enhanced pre-burst/persistent emission or the Comptonization of the burst emission is removed, the NS surface emission shows a plateau, and then a rise until the photosphere touches down to the NS surface, resulting in a flux peak at that moment. We speculate that the findings above correspond to that the obscured lower part of the NS surface by the disk is exposed to the line of sight due to the inner disk evaporation by the burst emission. The consistency between the fa model and convolution thermal-Comptonization model indicates the interplay between thermonuclear bursts and accretion environments. These phenomena did not usually show up by the conventional blackbody model fitting, which may be due to low count rate and narrow energy coverage in previous observations.