Timing and spectral analysis of the HMXB 4U 1700-37 observed with Insight-HXMT

Hua Xiao, Long Ji, Peng Zhang, Lorenzo Ducci, Victor Doroshenko, Andrea Santangelo, Shu Zhang, Shuang-Nan Zhang

Published 2023-12-28Version 1

We report timing and spectral studies of the high mass X-ray binary 4U 1700-37 using Insight-HXMT observations carried out in 2020 during its out-of-eclipse state. We found significant variations in flux on a time-scale of kilo-seconds, while the hardness (count rate ratio between 10-30 keV and 2-10 keV) remains relatively stable. No evident pulsations were found over a frequency range of $10^{-3}$-2000 Hz. During the spectral analysis, for the first time we took the configuration of different Insight-HXMT detectors' orientations into account, which allows us obtaining reliable results even if a stable contamination exists in the field-of-view. We found that the spectrum could be well described by some phenomenological models that commonly used in accreting pulsars (e.g., a power law with a high energy cutoff) in the energy range of 2-100 keV. We found hints of cyclotron absorption features around ~ 16 keV or/and ~ 50 keV.