Abstract
We present XMM-Newton observations of the WC binary 0 Muscae (WR 48), the second brightest Wolf-Rayet binary in optical wavelengths. The system consists of a short-period (19.1375 days) WC5/WC6 + 06/07V binary and possibly has an additional O supergiant companion (09.5/B0Iab) which is optically identified at a separation of ∼46 mas. Strong emission lines from highly ionized ions of C, O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, Ar, Ca and Fe are detected. The spectra are fitted by a multi-temperature thin-thermal plasma model with an interstellar absorption N H = 2-3 x 10 21 cm -2 . Lack of nitrogen line indicates that the abundance of carbon is at least an order of magnitude larger than that of nitrogen. A Doppler shift of ∼630 km s -1 is detected for the O VIII line, while similar shifts are obtained from the other lines. The reddening strongly suggests that the emission lines originated from the wind-wind shock zone, where the average velocity is ∼600 km s -1 . The red-shift motion is inconsistent with a scenario in which the X-rays originate from the wind-wind collision zone in the short-period binary, and would be evidence supporting the widely separated O supergiant as a companion. This may make up the collision zone be lying behind the short-period binary. In addition to the emission lines, we also detected the RRC (radiative recombination continuum) structure from carbon around 0.49 keV. This implies the existence of additional cooler plasma.
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