Evidence for a Variable Ultrafast Outflow in the Newly Discovered Ultraluminous Pulsar NGC 300 ULX-1
2018
Ultraluminous pulsars are a definite proof that persistent super-Eddington
accretion occurs in nature. They support the scenario according to which most
Ultraluminous X-ray Sources (ULXs) are super-Eddington accretors of stellar
mass rather than sub-Eddington intermediate mass black holes. An important
prediction of theories of supercritical accretion is the existence of powerful
outflows of moderately ionized gas at mildly relativistic speeds. In practice,
the spectral resolution of X-ray gratings such as RGS onboard XMM-Newton is
required to resolve their observational signatures in ULXs. Using RGS, outflows
have been discovered in the spectra of 3 ULXs (none of which are currently
known to be pulsars). Most recently, the fourth ultraluminous pulsar was
discovered in NGC 300. Here we report detection of an ultrafast outflow (UFO)
in the X-ray spectrum of the object, with a significance of at least 3{\sigma},
during one of the two simultaneous observations of the source by XMM-Newton and
NuSTAR in December 2016. The outflow has a projected velocity of about 72000
km/s (0.24c) and a high ionisation factor with a log value of 3.9. This is the
first time a detection of an ultrafast wind in a ULX was achieved using both
soft and hard X-ray data simultaneously, and it is also the first detection of
a UFO in a neutron star ULX. We find no evidence of the UFO during the other
observation of the object, which could be explained by either clumpy nature of
the absorber or a slight change in our viewing angle of the accretion flow.
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