Investigations of thermonuclear bursts from 4U 1323–62 using NICER

Abstract

Compact objects are generally observed in the binaries. When accretion takes place on the compact object from the companion star in the binary system, fuel accumulates on the surface of the star and after a considerable thick layer is formed it burns unstably giving a thermonuclear burst which lasts for 10 to 100 seconds. This thesis discusses the type-I thermonuclear bursts. The source 4U 1323–62 was used for investigating properties of the thermonuclear bursts. The observations were taken from NICER X-ray telescope which has good time resolution and the energy range where it is sensitive is ideal for study of bursts. The instrument used is the X-ray timing instrument (XTI) on-board NICER. We have scanned the light curves from entire public archival NICER data of 4U 1323–62 and searched for thermonuclear bursts. We detected 11 bursts. We have generated time-resolved spectra for every burst, used blackbody model for spectral fitting and studied how its parameter changes with time. We have also presented the energy resolved light curves for one of the bursts.