X-ray Variability of the Flare Star CC Eri

Extract

The flare/spotted spectroscopic binary star CC Eri (HD 16157) was observed in the periods 1990 July 9-11 and 1992 January 26-27 with the ROSAT PSPC detector (Pan and Jordan 1995). These high quality data give the first information on the temporal and spectral variability of CC Eri in the X-ray energy band.

During the ROSAT observations the X-ray intensity of the source is variable on timescales from a few minutes to several hours. The X-ray luminosity is in the range 2.5 – 6.8 × 10²⁹ erg s⁻¹, which is similar to values found from previous measurements with the Einstein IPC and EXOSAT LE. On 1990 July 10 an X-ray flare-like event was detected with an exponential rise time of about one hour and a decay time of about two hours. The X-ray spectrum of CC Eri can be described by current thermal plasma codes with two temperature components or with a continuous temperature distribution. The spectral results show that plasma at T_e ∼ 10⁷ K exists in the corona of CC Eri. We find that the X-ray spectrum is also variable and the variations of the emission measure, and to a lesser extent of the temperature, are correlated with the source intensity.