Measuring the Cosmic X-Ray Background in 3–20 KeV with Stray Light from NuSTAR

Abstract

By characterizing the contribution of stray light to large data sets from the CXB Measurement X-ray observatory collected over 2012–2017, we report a measurement of the cosmic X-ray background (CXB) in the 3–20 keV energy range. These data represent ∼20% sky coverage while avoiding Galactic ridge X-ray emission and are less weighted by deep survey fields than previous measurements with CXB Measurement. Images in narrow energy bands are stacked in detector space and spatially fit with a model representing the stray light and uniform pattern expected from the CXB and the instrumental background, respectively. We establish baseline flux values from Earth-occulted data and validate the fitting method on stray-light observations of the Crab, which further serve to calibrate the resulting spectra. We present independent spectra of the CXB with the focal plane module FPMA and FPMB detector arrays, which are in excellent agreement with the canonical characterization by HEAO 1 and are 10% lower than most subsequent measurements: F 3 − 20 keV FPMA = 2.63 × 10 − 11 erg s − 1 cm − 2 deg − 2 and F 3 – 20 keV FPMB = 2.58 × 10 − 11 erg s − 1 cm − 2 deg − 2 . We discuss these results in light of previous measurements of the CXB and consider the impact of systematic uncertainties on our spectra.