No enhanced non-thermal emission from eta Carinae at the end of the flare event
ATel #13368; K. Hamaguchi (NASA/GSFC & UMBC, USA), M. F. Corcoran (NASA/GSFC & CUA, USA), C. Ferrigno (ISDC/UNIGE, CH)
on 24 Dec 2019; 12:56 UT
Credential Certification: Kenji Hamaguchi (kenji.hamaguchi@umbc.edu)
Subjects: X-ray, Gamma Ray, Star, Variables
The NuSTAR X-ray observatory performed a Target-of-Opportunity observation of eta Carinae between 2019-12-07 21:11 and 2019-12-08 21:31 (UT), in response to a soft X-ray flare detected with NICER (ATEL #13327) and enhanced gamma-ray emission around the peak reported with AGILE (ATEL #13329). The NuSTAR observation detected non-thermal emission at ~2.1e-12 ergs cm-2 s-1 between 30-50 keV, which is, however, only ~10% higher than the non-thermal flux observed in March 2019. An INTEGRAL ToO observation of the star from 2019-12-06 to 2019-12-07 (ATEL #13347) marginally detected enhanced emission between 17-80 keV, which should be detected clearly with NuSTAR. This could either mean that either the marginal increase in non-thermal emission detected by INTEGRAL the day before the NuSTAR observation was spurious, or that the non-thermal emission seen by INTEGRAL faded by the time of the NuSTAR observation.
