Investigation of the Timing and Spectral Properties of an Ultraluminous X-Ray Pulsar NGC 7793 P13

Abstract

Abstract We perform both timing and spectral analyses using the archival X-ray data taken with Swift, XMM-Newton, NICER, and NuSTAR from 2016 to 2020 to study an ultraluminous pulsar, NGC 7793 P13, that showed a long period of super-Eddington accretion. We use the Rayleigh test to investigate the pulsation at different epochs, and confirm the variation of the pulse profile with finite Gaussian mixture modeling and a two-sample Kuiper test. Taking into account the periodic variation of the spin periods caused by the orbital Doppler effect, we further determine an orbital period of ∼65 days and show that no significant correlation can be detected between the orbital phase and the pulsed fraction. The pulsed spectrum of NGC 7793 P13 in the 0.5–20 keV range can be simply described using a power law with a high-energy exponential cutoff, while the broadband phase-averaged spectrum of the same energy range requires two additional components to account for the contribution of a thermal accretion disk and the Comptonization photons scattered into the hard X-rays. We find that NGC 7793 P13 stayed in the hard ultraluminous state and the pulsed spectrum was relatively soft when the source was faint at the end of 2019. Moreover, an absorption feature close to 1.3 keV is marginally detected from the pulsed spectra and it is possibly associated with a cyclotron resonant scattering feature.