Spectral Evolution of NGC 1313 X-2: Evidence against the Cool Disk Model

Abstract

The presence of a cool multicolor disk component with an inner disk temperature kT=~0.1-0.3 keV at a luminosity L>10⁴⁰ ergs s^-1 has been interpreted as evidence that the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 1313 X-2 harbors an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). The temperature of a disk component should vary with luminosity as L~T⁴. However, upon investigating the spectral evolution with multiple XMM-Newton observations, we found that the cool disk component failed to follow this relation, with a confidence level of 0.999964. Indeed, the luminosity decreases as the temperature increases, and the luminosities at high temperatures are more than an order of magnitude less than expected from the L~T⁴ extrapolation of luminosities at low temperatures. This places a strong constraint against the validity of modeling the X-ray spectra of NGC 1313 X-2 as emission from the accretion disk of an IMBH. The decrease in luminosity with increasing temperature of the soft component follows the trend suggested by a model in which the soft emission arises from an outflow from a stellar mass black hole with super-Eddington accretion viewed along the symmetry axis. Alternatively, the spectra can be adequately fitted by a p-free disk model with kT~2 keV and p~0.5. The spectral evolution is consistent with the L~T⁴ relation and appears to be a high-luminosity extension of the L-kT relation of Galactic black holes. This, again, would suggest that the emission is from a super-Eddington accreting stellar mass black hole.