X-Ray and UV Emission from VV Puppis

Abstract

We have discovered hard and soft X-ray emission from W Puppis, the last of the four classical AM Her stars to be detected in X-rays. The orbital light curves in both soft and hard X-rays are in excellent agreement with the mean optical light curve, indicating that essentially all of the accretion luminosity originates from a very small region at the white dwarf’s magnetic pole. An X-ray dip occurs once per binary period, when the magnetic pole lies closest to our line of sight, and is probably due to absorption. The X-ray data and optical spectroscopy constrain fairly well the geometry of the system, dictating an inclina-tion angle i < 70º and a mass for the white dwarf in excess of 1.1 Mʘ. X-ray and UV observations constrain the temperature of the soft X-ray component to lie in the range 20–45 eV, while the hard X-ray component has a temperature in excess of 6 keV. The observed flux of soft X-rays is much larger than that of hard X-rays. However, when the energy band-passes of the observations are taken into account, the ratio of the soft and hard X-ray luminosities Ls/Lh = 0.5-50. The ratio is unity for Tbb = 30 eV and Tbr = 50 keV; ifc is smaller if Tbb and/or Tbr are larger and is larger in the opposite case. These results, taken together with those for AM Her using the Einstein OGS, suggest that the famous “soft X-ray problem” in the AM Her stars may have gone away.