The star 1RXS J165424.6-433758 turned out to be a pole star. Preprint article about it published at arXiv.
Astronomers call the poles a special type of catastrophic variable – binary star systems that periodically flash from a white dwarf and an “ordinary” star, in which the white dwarf has a very strong magnetic field.
1RXS J165424.6-433758 (or AX J165420-4337) was first identified as an X-ray source by the ROSAT space telescope in the 1990s. At the same time, it was not clear to astronomers what kind of objects it belonged to. Brendan O’Connor of George Washington University and colleagues were able to figure this out by observing at many wavelengths using multiple telescopes.
“We present DGPS (Galactic Deep Survey) observations with Swift, NuSTAR, the South African Large Telescope and the South African Astronomical Observatory’s meter telescope and XMM-Newton archival observations and follow-up observations from the same source. The authors conclude that 1RXS J165424.6-43375 (hereafter J1654) is a typical polar magnetic catastrophe variable at a distance of about 460 parsecs from Earth.
J1654, 10.1 keV temperature and approximately 65 nonillion (10thirty) erg/s. Further analysis of the data showed that it was a pole with a rotation period of 2.87 hours and a magnetic field of 3.5 MG.
The white dwarf’s companion is a late evolutionary main sequence star with a radius of about 0.38 solar radii and an effective temperature of 4300 K. The white dwarf is estimated to have a mass of about 0.58 solar masses.
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