Long Term RXTE Monitoring of LMC X-3: Evidence for a Warped Accretion Disk?
J. Wilms
M.A. Nowak
K. Pottschmidt
W.A. Heindl
J. Dove
M.C. Begelman
R. Staubert
Abstract
The black hole candidate LMC X-3 is varying by a factor of four on a
timescale of 200 or 100 days (Cowley et al., 1991). The variability has
been interpreted as either due to variations in the mass transfer rate from
the B3 V star companion, or by partial obscurations by a warped accretion
disk. We have monitored the long term variability of LMC X-3 with RXTE in
three to four weekly intervals starting in December 1996 obtaining a large
observational database that might shed light on the nature of the long term
X-ray variability in this source. In this contribution we present the
results from this monitoring campaign. We study the correlations between
the flux in the soft and power-law spectral components and we model the
broad band X-ray spectrum of LMC X-3 using Monte Carlo Comptonization
computations.
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On 16 Jul 1999, 09:19.