The hard ultraluminous state of NGC 5055 ULX X-1

¹ Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata B1900FWA La Plata, Argentina
² Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Vía Láctea, La Laguna E-38205 Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
³ Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna E-38206 Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
⁴ Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía (CCT La Plata, CONICET; CICPBA; UNLP), C.C.5, (1894) Villa Elisa, Argentina

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 20 August 2025
Accepted: 29 October 2025

Abstract

We present the results of the first broadband X-ray analysis of the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 5055 ULX X-1, combining simultaneous data from XMM–Newton and NuSTAR missions, with a combined exposure time of ∼100 ks across the 0.3–20 keV energy range. The source exhibits a stable flux across the entire exposure with no detectable pulsations by any instrument on their X-ray light curves, placing pulsed-fraction upper limits of 10% and 32% for XMM–Newton and NuSTAR, respectively. The X-ray spectrum is dominated by two thermal components consistent with the emission from an accretion disk, and shows a weak high-energy tail above 10 keV, with no statistical requirement for an additional nonthermal component. The unabsorbed 0.3 − 20 keV luminosity is ∼2 × 10⁴⁰ erg s⁻¹, evidencing the ULX nature of the source. The parameters obtained from spectral modeling are consistent with the hard ultraluminous state. Despite the fact that a neutron-star accretor cannot be ruled out by the available data, under the assumption that the compact object in NGC 5055 ULX X-1 is a black hole accreting through a geometrically thick, radiation-pressure-supported disk that drives an optically thick wind, we constrained its putative mass to 11 − 26 M_⊙.