Insight-HXMT Observation of 4U 1608-52: Evidence of Interplay between a Thermonuclear Burst and Accretion Environment

A Type I burst could influence the accretion process through radiation pressure and Comptonization both for the accretion disk and the corona/boundary layer of an X-ray binary, and vice versa. We investigate the temporal evolution of a bright photospheric radius expansion (PRE) burst of 4U 1608-52 detected by Insight-HXMT in 1-50 keV, with the aim to study the interplay between the burst and persistent emission. Apart from the emission from the neutron star (NS) surface, we find residuals in both the soft (<3 keV) and hard (>10 keV) X-ray bands. Time-resolved spectroscopy reveals that the excess can be attributed to either an enhanced preburst/persistent emission or the Comptonization of the burst emission by the corona/boundary layer. The Comptonization model is a convolution thermal-Comptonization model (thcomp in XSPEC), and the Comptonization parameters are fixed at the values derived from the persistent emission. We find, during the PRE phase, after the enhanced preburst/persistent emission or the Comptonization of the burst emission is removed, the NS surface emission shows a plateau and then a rise until the photosphere touches down on the NS surface, resulting in a flux peak at that moment. We speculate that the findings above correspond to the lower part of the NS surface that is obscured by the disk being exposed to the line of sight due to the evaporation of inner disk by the burst emission. The consistency between the f ( a ) model and convolution thermal-Comptonization model indicates the interplay between thermonuclear bursts and accretion environments. These phenomena do not usually show up in conventional blackbody model fittings, which may be due to the low count rate and narrow energy coverage in previous observations.

Automated summary

This study investigates the interplay between a bright photospheric radius expansion (PRE) burst and persistent emission in 4U 1608-52. The findings indicate that the burst emission can be either enhanced preburst/persistent emission or the Comptonization of the burst emission by the corona/boundary layer. The temporal evolution of the NS surface emission shows a plateau and then a rise until the photosphere touches down on the NS surface, resulting in a flux peak.