On the detectability of CO molecules in the interstellar medium via X-ray spectroscopy

Abstract

We present a study of the detectability of CO molecules in the Galactic interstellar medium using high-resolution X-ray spectra obtained with the XMM-Newton Reflection Grating Spectrometer. We analyzed 10 bright low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) to study the CO contribution in their line-of-sights. A total of 25 observations were fitted with the ISMabs X-ray absorption model which includes photoabsorption cross-sections for O I, O II, O III and CO. We performed a Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation analysis of the goodness of fit in order to estimate the significance of the CO detection. We determine that the statistical analysis prevents a significant detection of CO molecular X-ray absorption features, except for the lines-of-sight toward XTE~J1718-330 and 4U~1636-53. In the case of XTE~J1817-330, this is the first report of the presence of CO along its line-of-sight. Our results reinforce the conclusion that molecules have a minor contribution to the absorption features in the O K-edge spectral region. We estimate a CO column density lower limit to perform a significant detection with XMM-Newton of N(CO) > 6x10^{16} cm-2 for typical exposure times