Transient Nature of J195754+353513 3
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Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 000, 1–9 (2017) Printed 14 June 2021 (MN LATEX style file v2.2) Transient nature of J195754+353513 Sabyasachi Pal1⋆ Dusmanta Patra1 Monique Hollick2,3 Sandip K. Chakrabarti4,1 1Indian Centre for Space Physics, 43 Chalantika, Garia Station Road, 700084, India 2Defense Science and Technology Group, West Avenue, Edinburgh, South Australia, 5111, Australia 3University of New South Wales, Anzac Parade, Kensington, NSW, 2052, Australia 4S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Block-JD, Sector-III, Salt Lake, Kolkata, 700098, India ABSTRACT We have searched for transient and/or variable radio sources in the field of Galactic micro-quasar Cygnus X-1 in 1.4 GHz (L band) using data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA). We used twenty years of data between 1983 and 2003. We found a source J195754+353513 showing transient behavior. The source was also mentioned earlier in NVSS and WENSS catalog but its transient nature was not reported earlier. The source is located 23.8 arcminutes far from Cygnus X-1. It is detected many times during the span of our study and it varied between less than 0.3 mJy to 201 mJy. J195754+353513 also showed high intra-day variability. In one occasion, the source rose from ∼ 20 mJy to ∼ 180 mJy 700 second. For limited number of cases circularly polarized emission could be detected from the source with V/I vary between 0.15 to 0.25. 2MASS J19575420+3535152 may be the near-infrared counterpart of the source. We compared the properties of the source with other Galactic transient sources having similar properties. The nature of the source is still unknown. We speculate on its possible nature. Key words: radio continuum: general – radio continuum: transients – radio contin- uum: stars – stars: flare – stars: variables: general – stars: individual: J195754+353513, Cygnus X-1, GCRT J1742–3001, GCRT J1745–3009 1 INTRODUCTION ple, A giant burst was detected from a young stellar object (Bower et al. 2003). Many 1–3 Jy radio bursts were found The steady state radio sky is considerably well stud- at high and low Galactic latitudes (Niinuma et al. 2007; ied and modeled (e.g. Becker, White & Helfand (1995); Matsumura et al. 2007; Kida et al. 2008). A periodic, co- Condon et al. (1998)) but dynamic radio sky is not studied herent and circularly polarized burst was found in an ultra- arXiv:1707.03878v1 [astro-ph.HE] 12 Jul 2017 in detail due to one or more reasons including lack of tele- cool dwarf (Hallinan et al. 2007). A few tens of Fast Radio scopes with large field of view, observational constraints, Bursts (FRBs) have been detected so far which lasted only band width and poor time resolution etc. There are vari- for a few milliseconds (e.g. Lorimer et al. (2007); Ravi et al. ous types of sources which show variability at different time (2016)). The origin of FRBs is still unclear but due to rela- scales. For example, brown dwarfs, flaring stars, masers, tively high dispersion measures, some believe these sources pulsars, micro-quasars, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and have extra-galactic origin (e.g. Lorimer et al. (2007)). active galactic nuclei show high levels of variability (e.g. Cordes, Lazio & McLaughlin (2004) for a review). Until re- Huge improvements in field of view, especially at low ra- cently there are only few radio surveys which searched for dio frequencies, helps to study transient and variable radio sources more effectively (e.g. Macquart (2014)). However, variable and transient radio sources efficiently (e.g., see, 2 (Gregory & Taylor 1986; Matsumura et al. 2009)). So, most no detection of any transient sources from recent 12000 deg of the radio transients have been found through follow-up systemic transient search comprising of 2800 pointings using observations of known or suspected transient emitters. with the Jansky Very Large Array Low-band Ionosphere and Recent programs to search for radio transients from di- Transient Experiment (VLITE) (Polisensky et al. 2016) and rect and archival observations revealed some potential ra- detection of only one transient source from monitoring of re- dio transients which are consistent with the expectation gion close to the North Celestial Pole (Stewart et al. 2016) covering 1925 deg2 using LOFAR and no detection of tran- that previous limitations on the detection of radio tran- 2 sients were instrumental and not astrophysical. For exam- sient source from 1430 deg search using Murchison Wide- field Array (MWA) (Bell et al. (2014); also see the MWA study by Rowlinson et al. (2016)) show that detections of ⋆ E-mail: [email protected] (SP) transient radio sources are currently not very common, es- c 2017 RAS 2 Pal et al. pecially at low radio frequencies. Future deep, wide-field significance of various findings in Section 4. Finally, we make searches may potentially be far more fruitful (e.g. recent concluding remarks in Section 5. transient rate calculations in Metzger, Williams & Berger (2015); Mooley et al. (2016)). Large archival data from various telescopes are im- 2 OBSERVATION AND DATA ANALYSIS portant resource to look for transient and variable radio WITH THE KARL G. JANSKY VERY sources. Earlier, Bannister et al. (2011) reported 15 tran- LARGE ARRAY sient sources from the study of 22 yr archival data of the Mo- 2 longlo Observatory Synthesis Telescope covering 2776 deg A blind search for new variable radio sources was conducted survey area. Recently, Murphy et al. (2017) found a candi- using archival JVLA data1 at the L-band frequency of 1400 date transient source at low frequency from comparison of MHz. L band is good for this kind of search with JVLA as it TIFR GMRT Sky Survey Alternative Data Release 1 (TGSS provides right balance between field of view and sensitivity. ADR1, see Intema et al. (2017)) and the GaLactic and Ex- Though the field of view in 74 and 325 MHz band with JVLA tragalactic All-sky Murchison Widefield Array (GLEAM, will be higher, these bands have relatively poor sensitivity. see Hurley-Walker et al. (2017)) survey catalogues. Many Availability of archival data is also less in frequencies less variable and transient radio sources were reported from than 1400 MHz. Also, for some sub-classes, the transient archival data search of the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) detection rate is higher at 1400 MHz, as discussed in Section (Condon et al. 1998) and FIRST survey (Levinson et al. 1. 2002; Thyagarajan et al. 2011). Ten milli Jansky level tran- JVLA comprises of twenty seven fully steerable anten- sients were detected from 22 years of archival the Karl G. nas each with 25-meter diameter in a Y-shaped array. It is Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) observations of a single located around eighty km west of Socorro, New Mexico. An- field-of-view at 5 and 8.4 GHz (Bower et al. 2007). Though it tennas are periodically moved in different configuration to was shown later that more than half of the transient sources achieve different scientific goals where the most expanded reported in Bower et al. (2007) were due to data artifacts antenna configuration is known as A configuration and the and rest of the sources had low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) most compact one is D configuration. B and C configura- than Bower et al. (2007) to conclusively find transient na- tions are intermediate between A and D. Occasionally an- ture of these sources (Frail et al. 2012). tennas are placed in a hybrid configurations, like AB or BC Earlier detection of two transient radio sources GCRT when some of the antennas are in one configuration and J1745–3009 (Hyman et al. 2005, 2007; Roy et al. 2010) and some of them in other. The maximum size of the baselines GCRT J1742–3001 (Hyman et al. 2009) were made from Bmax in A, B, C and D configurations are 36.4, 11.1, 3.4 systematic search near Galactic Center region using The and 1.03 km respectively which corresponds to synthesized Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) and Giant Me- beam-width (θHPBW ) 1.4, 4.6, 15 and 49 arcsec respectively terwave Radio Telescope (GMRT). GCRT J1745–3009 is a at 1400 MHz. unique source which was detected only three times in 2002 The data used for the present work was taken from dif- (Hyman et al. 2005), 2003 and 2004 (Hyman et al. 2007). In ferent configurations of the JVLA between 12 October 1983 2002, this source exhibited ∼10 minute long, ∼1 Jy peaked (MJD 45619) and 4 June 2003 (MJD 52794). In total, we bursts with a ∼77 minute period. The emission from the have used 262 different epochs of observations with various source was coherent (Hyman et al. 2005) with extremely intervals ranging from days to years between successive ob- steep spectral index (α = −13.5 ± 3.0) and high circular servations. The antennas were in configuration A, AB, AD, polarization (Roy et al. 2010). All the three detections of B, BC, C, CD, and D for 53, 16, 5, 46, 15, 45, 26, and 56 the source were in 330 MHz. The characteristics of GCRT days, respectively. J1742–3001 did not match with any known mechanisms of We studied a field centered on Cygnus X-1, a radio emit- emission in transient compact sources. As a result, the source ting X-ray binary (Bowyer et al. 1965; Giacconi et al. 1972) ◦ ′ ′′ seems to represent a member of a new class of coherently with co-ordinates 19h58m21.676s +35 12 05.78 (J2000). emitting objects. GCRT J1742–3001 was active for a few This area of the sky was chosen because the field of Cygnus months with ∼150 mJy flux density at the peak and showed X-1 is one of the best studied Galactic black hole binaries no periodicity in emission (Hyman et al.