X-ray spectroscopy of the High Mass X-ray Binary 4U1538-52

Abstract

The X-ray is a type of electromagnetic radiation which wavelength covers from 10nm to 0.01nm. They behave as particles rather than waves, for this reason it is easy to measure the energy of each photon. Therefore, we are working in the field of high energies. X-ray astronomy, which is a relative recent field, allows scientist to study many areas of research related to the most extreme physics phenomena of the universe. For instance: X-ray Binaries. This work is an X-ray spectroscopy study of the High-mass X-ray Binary (HMXB) 4U1538–52, which is an X-ray pulsar and an eclipsing system composed of a neutron star (the compact object) and a supergiant star (the donor mass donor). The purpose of this work is to use the X-rays in order to study the physical properties of the neutron star and the circumsource and interstellar medium through modelling both out of eclipse and eclipse data. We use a phenomenological model and a self-consistent model instead only a phenomenological one as done before in previous works. With this, we try to determinate which type of models fit well the source as well as to make a physical interpretation of this astrophysical object. At last, we talk about the future work to continue understanding better this source and we propose some models. We use the X-ray data of the source obtained by the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM–Newton observatory and the NASA’s analysis software of HEASoft, XSPEC, which is an spectral-fitting program. Hence, this work also allow us to introduce in the software used and in the whole process performed from data download through analysis and until the conclusions. That is: an introduction to the X-ray astronomy research.