The X-Ray Outburst of the Galactic Center Magnetar over Six Years of Chandra Observations

The magnetar SGR J1745-2900, discovered at a distance of parsecs from the Milky Way central black hole, Sagittarius A, represents the closest pulsar to a supermassive black hole ever detected. Furthermore, its intriguing radio emission has been used to study the environment of the black hole, as well as to derive a precise position and proper motion for this object. The discovery of SGR J1745-2900 has led to interesting debates about the number, age, and nature of pulsars expected in the Galactic center region. In this work, we present extensive X-ray monitoring of the outburst of SGR J1745-2900 using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the only instrument with the spatial resolution to distinguish the magnetar from the supermassive black hole (2.″4 angular distance). It was monitored from its outburst onset in 2013 April until 2019 August, collecting more than 50 Chandra observations for a total of more than 2.3 Ms of data. Soon after the outburst onset, the magnetar emission settled onto a purely thermal emission state that cooled from a temperature of about 0.9-0.6 keV over 6 yr. The pulsar timing properties showed at least two changes in the period derivative, increasing by a factor of about 4 during the outburst decay. We find that the long-term properties of this outburst challenge current models for the magnetar outbursts.
N.R., D.V., and A.B. are supported by the H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “MAGNESIA” under grant agreement No. 817661 (PI: Rea). N.R., F.C.Z., D.V., A.B., and D.F.T. also acknowledge support from grants SGR2017-1383 and PGC2018-095512-BI00. F.C.Z. is supported by a Juan de la Cierva fellowship. A.P. acknowledges financial support from grants ASI/INAF I/037/12/0, ASI/INAF 2017-14- H.0 (PI: Belloni) and from INAF grant “Sostegno alla ricerca scientifica main streams dell’INAF,” Presidential Decree 43/2018 (PI: Belloni). D.H. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant, the Fonds de recherche du Québec–Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) Nouveaux Chercheurs program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). G.L.I., S.M., and R.T. have been partially supported by PRIN-MIUR 2017. J.A.P. acknowledges support by the Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2019/071) and by Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PGC2018-095984- B-I00). G.P. is supported by the H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “Hot Milk” under grant agreement No. 865637. L.S. acknowledges financial contributions from ASI-INAF agreements 2017-14-H.O and I/037/12/0 and from “iPeska” research grant (PI: Andrea Possenti) funded under the INAF call PRIN-SKA/CTA (resolution 70/2016). We acknowledge support from the PHAROS COST Action (CA16214). This article is based on data obtained with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and on software and tools provided by the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), which is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. We thank the referee for useful suggestions. We are grateful to Giovanni Fazio, Joseph Hora, Gordon Garmire, and Steven Willner, and their proposal co-Is, for sharing their data.