Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 441, Issue 2, Pages 1825-1830Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu708
Keywords
binaries: general; stars: individual: XSS J12270-4859; stars: neutron; X-rays: binaries
Categories
Funding
- ERC [227947, 337062]
- Vrije Competitie grant from NWO
- NWO Vidi
- Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) [CE110001020]
- UnivEarthS Labex programme of Sorbonne Paris Cite [ANR-10-LABX-0023, ANR-11-IDEX-000502]
- Commonwealth of Australia
- ESA Member States
- NASA
- European Research Council (ERC) [337062] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/L000768/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- STFC [ST/L000768/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Millisecond radio pulsars acquire their rapid rotation rates through mass and angular momentum transfer in a low-mass X-ray binary system. Recent studies of PSR J1824-2452I and PSR J1023+0038 have observationally demonstrated this link, and they have also shown that such systems can repeatedly transition back-and-forth between the radio millisecond pulsar and low-mass X-ray binary states. This also suggests that a fraction of such systems are not newly born radio millisecond pulsars but are rather suspended in a back-and-forth, state-switching phase, perhaps for gigayears. XSS J12270-4859 has been previously suggested to be a low-mass X-ray binary, and until recently the only such system to be seen at MeV-GeV energies. We present radio, optical and X-ray observations that offer compelling evidence that XSS J12270-4859 is a low-mass X-ray binary which transitioned to a radio millisecond pulsar state between 2012 November 14 and December 21. We use optical and X-ray photometry/spectroscopy to show that the system has undergone a sudden dimming and no longer shows evidence for an accretion disc. The optical observations constrain the orbital period to 6.913 +/- 0.002 h.
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