The 100-month Swift Catalogue of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients
Abstract
The 100-month Swift Catalogue of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients, collects over a thousand Swift/BAT flares from 11 Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs), and is complete down to fluxes of about 6x1E-10 erg/cm2/s (daily timescale) and about 1.5x1E-9 erg/cm2/s (orbital timescale, averaging about 800 s) in the 15-150 keV energy band. These hard X-ray flares typically last a few hundred seconds, reach fluxes in excess of 100 mCrab (15-50 keV), and last much less than a day. Their clustering in orbital phase-space,however, demonstrates that the outbursts are a much longer phenomenon, lasting up to a few days, as previously observed in deeper Swift soft X-ray observations. This large dataset is used to probe the properties of the high and intermediate emission states in SFXTs, and to infer the properties of these binary systems, as well as to estimate the number of flares per year each source is likely to produce as a function of the detection threshold and limiting flux. We also present preliminary results from our analysis of spectral evolution-dependent flux light curves and broad-band spectroscopy of the outbursts.
- Publication:
-
AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #14
- Pub Date:
- August 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014HEAD...1440403R