English

Recurrent ~24 h Periods in RXTE ASM Data

Astrophysics 2010-03-26 v2

Abstract

Analysis of data from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite's All Sky Monitor instrument for several X-ray binary sources has identified a recurrent \~24 h period. This period is sometimes highly significant, giving rise to the possibility of it being identified as an orbital or super-orbital period. Further analysis has revealed the same period in a number of other X-ray sources. As a result this period has been discounted as spurious, described variously as arising from daily variations in background levels and beating between the sampling period and long-term secular trends in the light curves. We present here an analysis of the spurious periods and show that the dominant mechanism is in fact spectral leakage of low-frequency power present in the light curves.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0502006,
  title  = {Recurrent ~24 h Periods in RXTE ASM Data},
  author = {S. A. Farrell and P. M. O'Neill and R. K. Sood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0502006},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

9 Pages, 10 figures, 1 table, submitted to PASA 20th December 2004. Added 1 page of text and 3 figures to clarify results and discussion. Resubmitted 16th May 2005. Accepted 25th June 2005

R2 v1 2026-07-22T08:48:07.729Z