The 100-month Swift Catalogue of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients
Abstract
We present the 100-month Swift Catalogue of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients, a collection of over a thousand Swift/BAT flares from 11 Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXT), complete down to 15-150 keV fluxes of about ∼6×10^{-10} erg cm^{-2} s^{-1} (daily timescale) and about ∼ 1.5×10^{-9} erg cm^{-2} s^{-1} (orbital timescale, averaging about 800 s). This population is characterized by short (a few hundred seconds) and relatively bright (in excess of 100 mCrab, 15-50 keV) events, lasting much less than a day in the hard X-rays. The outbursts are a much longer phenomenon however, as testified by the clustering of flares in orbital phase-space. They last up to a few days, as previously discovered from Swift deeper soft X-ray observations. We use this large dataset to probe the properties of the high and intermediate emission states in SFXTs, and to infer the properties of these binary systems. We also present preliminary results from our analysis of spectral evolution dependent flux light curves and broad-band spectroscopy of the outbursts. Finally, we provide a recipe to estimate the number of flares per year each source is likely to produce as a function of the detection threshold and limiting flux.
- Publication:
-
The X-ray Universe 2014
- Pub Date:
- July 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014xru..confE.176R