5th Fermi Symposium : Nagoya, Japan : 20-24 Oct, 2014 1

X-Ray Studies of Redbacks

Mallory S.E. Roberts
New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE / Eureka Scientific, Oakland, CA. USA
Maura A. McLaughlin, Peter A. Gentile
West Virginia University, Morgantown WV, USA
Paul S. Ray
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC, USA
Scott M. Ransom
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville VA, USA
Jason W.T. Hessels
ASTRON, Dwingeloo, Netherlands
arXiv:1502.07208v1 [astro-ph.HE] 25 Feb 2015

We consider the X-ray properties of the redback class of eclipsing millisecond pulsars. These are transitional
systems between accreting low-mass X-ray binaries and binary millisecond pulsars orbiting white dwarfs, and
hence their companions are non-degenerate and nearly Roche-lobe filling. The X-ray luminosity seems to scale
with the fraction of the pulsar sky subtended by the companion, suggesting the shock region is not much
larger than the companion, which is supported by modeling of the orbital light curves. The typical X-ray
photon spectral index is 1 and the typical 0.3-8 keV X-ray efficiency, assuming a shock size on the order
of the companions Roche lobe cross-section, is on the order of 10%. We present an overview of previous
investigations, and present new observations of two redbacks, a Chandra observation of PSR J16283205 and
a XMM-Newton observation of PSR J21290429. The latter shows a clearly double peaked orbital light curve
with variation of the non-thermal flux by a factor of 11, with peaks around orbital phases 0.6 and 0.9. We
suggest the magnetic field of the companion plays a significant role in the X-ray emission from intrabinary
shocks in redbacks.

1. The Redback Population high value at the light cylinder to an apparently low
value at the termination shock in typical pulsar wind
nebulae [cf. Kennel & Coroniti 1984]. The basic shock
Millisecond pulsars are thought to be formed in bi- emission theory for such intrabinary shocks has gener-
nary systems where an old neutron star is spun-up ally followed the outline of Arons & Tavani [1993] first
via long term accretion from an evolved companion. developed for the original black widow system. In this
In recent years, the MSP recycling scenario has been model, the pulsar wind shocks with material ablated
dramatically confirmed through observations of so- from the companions surface, which is presumably
called redback millisecond pulsar systems [Roberts swept back around the companion and ejected from
2011] which have non-degenerate companions and in the system. In these models, it is generally assumed
some cases transition between states with no visible that the only significant source of magnetic field is the
radio pulsations but with optical and X-ray evidence magnetization of the wind, and that the X-ray emis-
of an accretion disk, and a state where radio pulsa- sion is synchrotron which can be somewhat beamed
tions are observed that regularly eclipse near supe- either through a partially ordered magnetic field or
rior conjunction. The first of these transition objects, doppler boosting.
PSR J1023+0038, showed optical evidence for an ac-
cretion disk in 2001 which had disappeared by 2004 A Chandra observation of PSR J1023+0038 in its
[Thorstensen & Armstrong 2005] . In 2007, radio pul- radio pulsar state revealed significant orbital variabil-
sations were discovered [Archibald et al. 2009], and in ity over five consecutive orbits [Bogdanov et al. 2011],
2013 the MSP returned to an accreting state [Stappers with a pronounced dip in the X-ray flux at supe-
et al. 2014]. rior conjunction, when the companion is between the
Millisecond pulsars in compact binary systems have pulsar and observer and the intrabinary shock pro-
the potential of providing unique insights into pulsar duced through the interaction of stellar outflows is
winds. The companion forces a shock to occur at a obscured. The X-ray spectrum consists of a domi-
distance ds only 104 times the light cylinder radius nant non-thermal component from the shock and at
of the pulsar Rlc = Ps c/2 (where Ps is the spin pe- least one thermal component, likely originating from
riod, and c the speed of light), as compared to the heated pulsar polar caps. The eclipse depth and du-
more typical ds 108 109 Rlc of the termination ration imply that the shock is localized near or at
shock of pulsar wind nebulae around young, isolated the companion surface. However, the companion only
pulsars. This means that the shock probes the wind subtends 1% of the pulsars sky, so that if the wind
in a region which might be significant in determining is isotropic, only 1% of the pulsars wind is inter-
how the magnetization parameter , the ratio of mag- cepted by the companion, and only 7% would be
netic energy to kinetic energy, goes from a presumably intercepted if the wind is confined to an equatorial

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2 5th Fermi Symposium : Nagoya, Japan : 20-24 Oct, 2014

1e+34
sheet. Bogdanov et al. [2011] inferred a high from Redbacks
Black Widows
the estimated magnetic field of 40G required to ac- RB predicted BB flux
BW predicted BB flux
count for the soft X-ray luminosity. 1e+33 50% efficiency

0.3-8keV X-Ray Luminosity (erg/s)

5% efficiency
0.5% efficiency
An observation with NuSTAR of PSR J1023+0038
just before it returned to the accreting state [Ten- 1e+32
dulkar et al. 2014] showed that the spectrum of the
intrabinary shock is a very hard power law (photon in-
1e+31
dex = 1.17) with no apparent cutoff out to 50keV,
for a remarkable X-ray efficiency of 2% of the total
spin down power, or around all of the nominal spin 1e+30

down power in the wind that would be intercepted by

the companion. Such a hard spectrum is not easily 1e+29
obtained from a pulsar wind nebula shock, and such 1e+30 1e+31 1e+32 1e+33 1e+34
Shock Luminosity (erg/s)
efficiency is unprecedented. This might be an indi-
cation of a significant equatorial enhancement in the Figure 1: Comparison of the X-Ray luminosity from the
wind or a significantly higher moment of inertia than redback population to that of the black widow
the canonical 1045 gm cm2 , but it is still a remarkably population. We define the shock luminosity as E c
high efficiency under any circumstances. where c is the fraction of the pulsar sky subtended by
Systematic studies of X-ray emission from redbacks the companion. We also plot the expected blackbody
show some commonalities. Linares [2014] examined luminosity for each pulsar, assuming the relationship of
Bognar et al. [2015] Lbb = 1021.28 E 0.25
the Swift XRT data on redbacks and noted that, while
in the pulsar state, their 0.5-10 keV luminosities tend
to be in the range of Lx 1032 erg s1 divided into
relatively high luminosity (LX > 32 1 Table I Redbacks
10 ergs s ) and Pulsar log E a db log LcX dc refs
relatively low (LX < 10 32
ergs s1
). Studies of indi-
vidual systems show that, on average, there is orbital J1023+0038 34.7 1.3 1.00+0.05
0.08 32.0 1.3% (1)
modulation with an overall increase of about a factor J12274859 35.0 1.4 1.16+0.07
0.08 31.9 1.6% (2)
of 2 centered around inferior conjunction, often with J16283205 34.2 1.2 1.2+0.8
0.7 31.3 1.1%
a hint of a double peaked structure [Bogdanov et al. J17232837 34.7 0.75 1.12+0.02
0.02 32.1 2.0% (3)
2014,?, Gentile et al. 2014, Kong et al. 2012]. How- J1816+4510 34.7 4.5 31.0 0.28% (4) (5)
ever, in most cases the overall count rate is too low to
J21290429 34.6 0.9 1.04+0.11
0.12 31.3 1.2%
clearly distinguish fine structure to the orbital light
J2215+5135 34.7 3.0 1.2+0.4
0.3 31.9 1.4% (6)
curve. Black widows, on the other hand, show a much
greater variety in their orbital light curves, with some, J23390533 34.4 0.4 1.09+0.40
0.13 30.6 1.6% (7) (8)
like the original black widow PSR B1957+20 [Huang a. erg/s b. kpc, from dispersion measure except for
et al. 2012], having peaks centered around superior J1023+0038 from parallax [Deller et al. 2012] and J1816+4510
conjunction and others around inferior conjunction from optical Kaplan et al. [2013] c. erg/s 0.3-8 keV d.
[Gentile et al. 2014]. On average, the redbacks are estimated percentage of pulsar sky subtended by companion,
(1) Bogdanov et al. [2011] (2) Bogdanov et al. [2014] (3)
more luminous than the black widows in X-rays. Bogdanov et al. [2014] (4) Stovall et al. [2014] (5) Kaplan et
The light curve modeling of Bogdanov et al. [2011] al. [2013] (6) [Gentile et al. 2014] (7) Romani & Shaw [2011]
suggests that the X-ray emission happens very close (8) Ray et al. [2014]
to the surface of the companion, which suggests that
little of the wind that is not directly intercepted by
the companion takes part in the X-ray emitting shock.
The fraction of the pulsars sky subtended by the com- c 1.3% for redbacks and c 0.3% for black wid-
panion, c , can be calculated from knowledge of the ows, accounting for much of the relative brightness
relative masses (requiring knowledge of the orbital in- of the shock emission of redbacks compared to black
clination angle), the fraction of the Roche lobe the widows.
companion fills, and the orbital separation. The in- We define a shock luminosity as E c and plot
clination angle and Roche lobe filling fraction can be that vs. the observed 0.3-8 keV X-ray luminosity
estimated from optical photometric light curves (eg. of redbacks and black widows (Fig.1). We also plot
[Breton et al. 2013]), and when combined with opti- the expected 0.3-8 keV blackbody emission from
cal radial velocity measurements and the pulsar orbit each pulsar based on a correlation determined from
solution can be used to estimate the masses of the in- MSPs with good parallax measurements log Lbb =
dividual components. In the table, we calculate c (0.250.16) log E +(21.285.36) [Bognar et al. 2015].
from our best guess estimates of neutron star mass, We see that the shock luminosity and X-ray luminos-
Roche lobe filling factor, and inclination angle using ity are correlated, with a typical soft X-ray efficiency
optical fits where available. On average, we estimate relative to the shock luminosity of 12%, albeit with

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 5th Fermi Symposium : Nagoya, Japan : 20-24 Oct, 2014 3

large scatter. We make no estimate of errors in the

shock luminosity, being as they are dominated by the
very uncertain distances in most cases and a lack of
strong constraints from the optical data on inclination
and the masses from the optical data in many cases.
The redback with the smallest estimated c and hence
has one of the lowest luminosities is PSR J1816+4510.
Optical studies of its companion suggest that it may
be a proto-white dwarf which is significantly under-
filling its Roche lobe [Kaplan et al. 2013].
Spectrally, the X-ray emission tends to have a con-
stant thermal component, presumably from heated
polar caps and consistent with the typical thermal
emission from MSPs, and an orbitally variable power-
law component. The fit power-law tends to be very
hard with photon spectral index 1, harder than
the typical spectra of pulsar wind nebulae around iso-
lated young pulsars which have 1.5 in their inner,
uncooled regions [Kargaltsev & Pavlov 2010]. Below
we report on new X-ray observations of two redbacks
discovered by the Green Bank Telescope.

2. PSR J16283205
Discovered in a survey of F ermi sources with the
GBT at 820 MHz (Sanpa-Arsa et al. in prep), PSR
J16283205 is a 3.21 ms pulsar in a 5.0 hr or-
bit around a companion with minimum mass Mc >
0.16M (assuming Mns = 1.4M ) (Hessels et al. in
prep). The pulsar is eclipsed for about 20% of the
orbit. It is modestly energetic with a standard spin-
down energy of E = 1.8 1034 ergs and an esti-
mated distance from the pulse dispersion measure Figure 2: 20 ks Chandra ACIS-S observation of PSR
d 1.2 kpc. Optical observations suggest it is Roche J16283205. Top: Individual photon energies and
lobe filling with minimal heating of the companion [Li average count rates as a function of orbital phase. The
et al. 2014]. pulsar superior conjunction is defined as phase 1.25. The
We observed PSR J16283205 for 20 ks (slightly dashed lines show roughly the phase range of the radio
more than one orbit) on 05 May 2012 with the eclipse. Bottom: 0.3-8keV spectrum showing absorbed
Chandra ACIS-S and detected 180 counts. The power-law, blackbody, and blackbody+ power-law fits.
counts as a function of orbital phase and energy, plot-
ted in Figure 2, suggest that there may be a dip
in the above 2 keV flux near superior conjunction. freedom, with less than 1% of KS realizations hav-
The spectrum seems to have a significant power law ing a smaller test statistic. The best fit values were
component, with a purely blackbody spectrum not nH = 2.2 1021 cm2 , kT = 0.20 keV and = 1.14.
giving an acceptable fit. Using the CSTAT statis- The covariance between the blackbody temperature
tic of XSPEC (appropriate given the low number of and the power-law index made it difficult to derive
counts per bin) suggests a pure power law fit pro- reasonable error bars if all parameters were allowed to
vides a somewhat reasonable fit (C-Statistic 24.97 vary freely, but by constraining the blackbody temper-
with 22 degrees of freedom), with best fit absorption ature to vary only between kT = 0.10.25 keV, within
nH = 1.3(0.2 2.5) 1021 cm2 and power-law index which range are the vast majority of MSPs, we find
= 1.60(1.23 2.00). Using the KS test statistic to 90% confidence regions of nH = (0.38.4)1021 cm2
determine goodness of fit results in 20% of realizations and = (0.5 2.0). The 0.3-8 keV model flux is
having a lower test statistic, suggesting improvements Fx = 8.81014 erg cm2 s1 with an unabsorbed flux
can be made. Since most MSPs have a significant of Fx = 1.2 1013 erg cm2 s1 , with roughly 70% in
thermal component to their X-ray emission, we next the power law and 30% in the blackbody. The fit nH
tried an absorbed blackbody plus power-law fit. This is consistent with the Drimmel et al. [2003] Galactic
resulted in a C-statistic of 21.08 with 20 degrees of extinction model for a distance of 1.2 kpc.

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4 5th Fermi Symposium : Nagoya, Japan : 20-24 Oct, 2014

PSR J21290429
0.16

0.14

104
0.12
Orbital Phase 0.5750.65

0.1

Photons cm2 s1 keV1

Counts/s

105
0.08 Orbital Phase 0.20.3

0.06

106
0.04

0.02

107
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6
Orbital Phase 0.5 1 2 5
Energy (keV)

Figure 3: XM M N ewton 0.1-10 keV light curve of

PSR J21290429 as a function of orbital phase. The Figure 4: Unfolded XM M N ewton PN spectrum of
pulsar superior conjunction is indicated by vertical blue PSR J21290429 at two orbital phases, keeping the
lines. blackbody component fixed.

3. PSR J21290429 1/4 of the flux near superior conjunction. The power-
law component is very hard ( = 1.04(0.92 1.15)),
Discovered in a survey of F ermi sources using similar to other redbacks. Presuming a constant ther-
the GBT at 350 MHz [Hessels et al. 2011], PSR mal component throughout the orbit, the difference
J21290429 is a 7.61 ms pulsar in a 15.2 hr orbit in the non-thermal flux between the peak at orbital
around a Mc > 0.37M companion which shows ex- phases 0.575-0.65 and the minimum at phases 0.2-0.3
tensive radio eclipses, as much as half the orbit at low is about a factor of 11 (Fig. 4). There is no evidence
frequencies (Hessels et al. in prep). The pulsar has a of significantly increased absorption. Complete spec-
very high magnetic field for a MSP (B 1.6 109 G), tral results will be presented in an upcoming paper
and so still has a high spin down energy E 3.91034 (Roberts et al. in prep).
despite its relatively long spin period. The dispersion This very remarkable variability suggests that a
measure distance is d 0.9 kpc. A variable, bright large fraction of the shock region is blocked by the
UV counterpart was evident in the Swift UVOT, as companion around superior conjunction, suggesting a
was significant X-ray variability from the Swift XRT quite small emission region and a large inclination
data. Further optical observations suggest the com- angle. The two distinct peaks may be a result of
panion is minimally heated and mostly Roche lobe doppler boosting and/or relativistic beaming of the
filling and radial velocity measurements suggest a synchrotron radiation. The latter would require a
pulsar mass Mns > 1.7M and a companion mass strong, well ordered magnetic field. The orbital phases
Mc 0.5M [Bellm et al. 2013]. These system prop- of the peaks, 0.6 and 0.9, are quite curious. If
erties suggest that PSRJ21290429 is in a relatively the shock was wrapped around the companion, then
early stage in its evolution compared to other redbacks you would expect there to be peaks between phases
which are more fully spun-up and have typical mag- 0.0-0.5. The qualities may suggest a significant role
netic fields of a few 108 G. Very large orbital variations for the magnetic field of the companion. If the com-
are observed through radio timing, and pulsations are panion is tidally locked, like one would expect, then
dominant in the -ray emission. the orbital period of 15.2 hr is the spin period of the
We observed PSR J21290429 for 70 ks with companion, which is very rapid. Low mass, rapidly
XM M N ewton. There were no background flares spinning stars can have surface magnetic fields of sev-
during the observation, meaning we got continuous eral hundred to a few thousand Gauss [Morin 2012].
coverage over slightly more than a complete orbit. Such potentially large companion fields should not be
The X-ray light curve has very large amplitude vari- ignored when investigating the shock emission from
ations, with two clear peaks centered on the pulsars redbacks.
inferior conjunction (Fig.3). We first fit the spectrum In summary, X-ray emission from the intrabinary
with an absorbed blackbody plus power-law, which shock in redbacks is orbitally dependent, with the in-
gave an adequate fit. The flux is dominated by the creased emission centered on inferior conjunction with
power-law component, with an average 0.3-8 keV flux potentially a fairly ubiquitous double peaked struc-
Fx = 2.25 0.05erg cm2 s1 . There is very little ture. The emission seems to come from a region that
absorption (nH = 1.8(0 4.6) 1020 cm2 ) and the is not much larger than the companion, is very hard
thermal component (kT = 0.21(0.160.26) keV) has a and very efficient, which needs explanation. The pre-
0.3-8 keV flux Fbb 1.21014 erg cm2 s1 , or about viously ignored potential role of the companions mag-

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 5th Fermi Symposium : Nagoya, Japan : 20-24 Oct, 2014 5

netic field in the shock dynamics needs to be consid- Deller, A. T., Archibald, A. M., Brisken, W. F., et al.
ered. 2012, ApJL, 756, L25
Drimmel, R., Cabrera-Lavers, A., & Lopez-
Corredoira, M. 2003, A& A, 409, 205
Gentile, P. A., Roberts, M. S. E., McLaughlin, M. A.,
Acknowledgments et al. 2014, Astrophys. J., 783, 69
Hessels, J. W. T., Roberts, M. S. E., McLaughlin,
Support for this work was provided by the National M. A., et al. 2011, American Institute of Physics
Aeronautics and Space Administration through Chan- Conference Series, 1357, 40
dra Award Number GO2-13056X issued by the Chan- Huang, R. H. H., Kong, A. K. H., Takata, J., et al.
dra X-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by 2012, Astrophys. J., 760, 92
the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and Kaplan, D. L., Bhalerao, V. B., van Kerkwijk, M. H.,
on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Admin- et al. 2013, Astrophys. J., 765, 158
istration under contract NAS8-03060. This work is Kargaltsev, O., & Pavlov, G. G. 2010, X-ray Astron-
based on observations obtained with XMM-Newton, omy 2009; Present Status, Multi-Wavelength Ap-
an ESA science mission with instruments and contri- proach and Future Perspectives, 1248, 25
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