Investigation of the energy dependence of the orbital light curve in LS 5039

Abstract

LS 5039 is so far the best-studied γ-ray binary system at multiwavelength energies. A time-resolved study of its spectral energy distribution (SED) shows that above 1 keV its power output is changing along its binary orbit as well as being a function of energy. To disentangle the energy dependence of the power output as a function of orbital phase, we investigated in detail the orbital light curves as derived with different telescopes at different energy bands. We analysed the data from all existing International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL)/INTEGRAL on-board Imager/INTEGRAL Soft Gamma-Ray Imager observations of the source and generated the most up-to-date orbital light curves at hard X-ray energies. In the γ-ray band, we carried out orbital phase-resolved analysis of Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) data between 30 MeV and 10 GeV in five different energy bands. We found that, at ≥100 MeV and ≤1 TeV the peak of the γ-ray emission is near orbital phase 0.7, while between ∼100 MeV and ∼1 GeV it moves close to orbital phase 1.0 in an orbital anticlockwise manner. This result suggests that the transition region in the SED at soft γ-rays (below a hundred MeV) is related to the orbital phase interval of 0.5-1.0 but not to the one of 0.0-0.5, when the compact object is 'behind' its companion. Another interesting result is that between 3 and 20 GeV no orbital modulation is found, although Fermi-LAT significantly (∼18σ) detects LS 5039. This is consistent with the fact that at these energies, the contributions to the overall emission from the inferior conjunction phase region (INFC, orbital phase 0.45-0.9) and from the superior conjunction phase region (orbital phase 0.9-0.45) are equal in strength. At TeV energies the power output is again dominant in the INFC region and the flux peak occurs at phase ∼0.7.