Observations of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients with LOFT
Abstract
Supergiant Fast X-ray transients are a subclass of high mass X-ray binaries displaying a peculiar and still poorly understood extreme variability in the X-ray domain. These sources undergo short sporadic outbursts (LX ~ 10^36 - 10^37 erg/s), lasting few ks at the most, and spend a large fraction of their time in an intermediate luminosity state at about LX ~ 10^33 - 10^34 erg/s. The sporadic and hardly predictable outbursts of supergiant fast X-ray transients were so far best discovered by large field of view (FOV) coded-mask instruments; their lower luminosity states require, instead, higher sensitivity focusing instruments to be studied in sufficient details. In this contribution, we provide a summary of the current knowledge on Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients and explore the contribution that the new space mission concept LOFT, the Large Observatory For X-ray Timing, will be able to provide in the field of research of these objects.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1212.0323,
title = {Observations of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients with LOFT},
author = {E. Bozzo and P. Romano and C. Ferrigno and P. Esposito and V. Mangano},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.0323},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication on Advances in Space Research; 6 figures, 17 pages