100-month Swift catalogue of SFXTs Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Romano P.
  2. Krimm H.A.
  3. Palmer D.M.
  4. Ducci L.
  5. Esposito P.
  6. Vercellone S.,Evans P.A.
  7. Guidorzi C.
  8. Mangano V.
  9. Kennea J.A.
  10. Barthelmy S.D.,Burrows D.N.
  11. Gehrels N.
  12. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs) are High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs) that are defined by their hard X-ray flaring behaviour. During such flares they reach peak luminosities of 10^36^-10^37^erg/s for a few hours (in the hard X-ray): much shorter timescales than those characterizing Be/X-ray binaries. We investigate the characteristics of bright flares (detections in excess of 5{sigma}) for a sample of SFXTs and their relation to the orbital phase. We have retrieved all Swift/BAT Transient Monitor light curves, and collected all detections in excess of 5{sigma} from both daily- and orbital-averaged light curves in the time range 2005 February 12 to 2013 May 31 (MJD 53413-56443). We also considered all on-board detections as recorded in the same time span and selected those within 4 arcmin of each source in our sample and in excess of 5{sigma}. We present a catalogue of over a thousand BAT flares from 11 SFXTs, down to 15-150keV fluxes of ~6x10^-10^erg/cm^2^/s (daily timescale) and ~1.5x10^-9^erg/cm^2^/s (orbital timescale, averaging ~800s) and spanning 100 months. The great majority of these flares are unpublished. This population is characterized by short (a few hundred seconds) and relatively bright (in excess of 100mCrab, 15-50keV) events. In the hard X-ray, these flares last in general much less than a day. Clustering of hard X-ray flares can be used to indirectly measure the length of an outburst, even when the low-level emission is not detected. We construct the distributions of flares, of their significance (in terms of sigma) and their flux as a function of orbital phase, to infer the properties of these binary systems. In particular, we observe a trend of clustering of flares at some phases as P_orb increases, as consistent with a progression from tight, circular or mildly eccentric orbits at short periods, to wider and more eccentric orbits at longer orbital periods. Finally, we estimate the expected number of flares for a given source for our limiting flux and provide the recipe for calculating them for the limiting flux of future hard X-ray observatories.

Keywords
  1. x-ray-sources
  2. x-ray-binary-stars
  3. surveys
  4. supergiant-stars
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2014A&A...562A...2R
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/562/A2
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/562/A2
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.35620002

Access

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History

2014-01-29T08:19:04Z
Resource record created
2014-01-29T08:19:04Z
Created
2017-12-05T05:09:59Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr