X-ray Detection of the Protostar IRAS 16562-3959
ATel #11236; Tobit Glenhaber (Commonwealth School), Alexander Seguin (Commonwealth School), Jeremy Drake (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory), Antonella Fruscione (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory)
on 26 Jan 2018; 23:04 UT
Credential Certification: Jeremy J. Drake (jdrake@cfa.harvard.edu)
Subjects: X-ray, Young Stellar Object, Pre-Main-Sequence Star
We report the X-ray detection of the massive protostar IRAS 16562-3959 as well as one of its outer radio lobes (Guzman et al. 2010, ApJ,725,734) using two observations obtained by the Chandra X-ray Observatory ACIS-I detector on 2015-06-30 (38.58ks exposure) and 2015-07-03 (40.07 ks exposure). The X-ray source position of the star are 16:59:41.64, -40:03:43.7. IRAS 16562-3959 is a bright infrared source with a reported bolometric luminosity of 7*10^4 L_sun. Summing the two observations, Chandra observed a net 76+/-9 counts from the protostar and 99+/-11 counts from the outer eastern lobe, or count rates of 9.6+/-1.1e-4 c/s and 13+/-1.3e-4 c/s respectively. Over the observation, we observed variability of about a factor of two in the protostar. The protostar X-ray spectrum is well-represented by an absorbed thermal plasma emission model (xsapec with xsphabs). The best-fit model parameters are a temperature of kT = 0.57(+0.45/-0.23) keV and hydrogen column density of nH = 8.0(+5.7/-3.3) cm^-2. The flux of the protostar in the 0.5-7 keV band is 2.3(+1.7/-3.0)e-14 erg/cm^2/s. The flux of the outer radio lobe in the 0.5-7 keV band is 2.3(+1.7/-2.9)e-14 erg/cm^2/s (all uncertainties 1 sigma).
