| 17th of June 2021 |
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| Evolution of the outburst of the black hole transient MAXI J1348–630 |
| by Carotenuto et al. |
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Carotenuto et al. have presented radio and X-ray monitoring campaign of an outburst of
MAXI J1348–630, a new black hole X-ray binary (XRB) discovered in 2019 January. They
observed MAXI J1348–630 for ∼14 months in the radio band with MeerKAT and the
Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), and in the X-rays with MAXI and Swift/XRT.
Throughout the outburst we detected and tracked the evolution of the compact and transient
jets.
Following the main outburst, the system underwent at least 4 hard-state-only re-flares,
during which compact jets were again detected.
From the jet motion, the ejecta inclination and speed can be constrained.
After travelling with constant speed, the first component
underwent a strong deceleration, which was covered with unprecedented detail and suggested
that MAXI J1348–630 could be located inside a low-density cavity in the interstellar medium,
as already proposed for XTE J1550–564 and H1743–322.
The figure above shows the X-ray and radio light curves of MAXI J1348–630 during its 2019/2020 outburst. The un-shaded regions mark the periods in which the source was in the hard X-ray state, while the light grey shaded regions indicate the intermediate state and the light pink regions indicate the soft state. Top panel: Unabsorbed X-ray flux light curve of MAXI J1348–630 from Swift/XRT observations in the 1–10 keV energy range (left y-axis). The four re-flares that followed the main outburst are marked on the figure with R1,2,3,4. We also show the MAXI/GSC daily count rate (right y-axis). Bottom panel: Radio light curve of MAXI J1348–630 at the core location (excluding large scale jets). Black dots are for 1.28 GHz MeerKAT observations, while the others are for multi-frequency ATCA observations. The results have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. |