Unveiling supergiant fast X-ray transient sources with INTEGRAL
Abstract
Supergiant high mass X-ray binaries (SGXBs) are believed to be rare objects, as stars in the supergiant phase have a very short lifetime and to date only about a dozen of them have been discovered. They are known to be persistent and bright X-ray sources. INTEGRAL is changing this classical picture as its observations are revealing the presence of a new subclass of SGXBs which have been labelled as supergiant fast X-ray transients (SFXTs) as they are strongly characterized by fast X-ray outbursts lasting less than a day, typically a few hours. We report on IBIS detections of newly discovered fast X-ray outbursts from 10 sources, four of which have been recently optically identified as supergiant high mass X-ray binaries. In particular for one of them, IGR J11215-5952, we observe fast X-ray transient behaviour for the first time. The remaining six sources (IGR J16479-4514, IGR J16418-4532, XTE J1743-363, IGR J16195-4945=AX J161929-4945, AX J1749.1-2733, IGR J17407-2808) are still unclassified, however they can be considered as candidate SFXTs because of their similarity to the known SFXTs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0603756,
title = {Unveiling supergiant fast X-ray transient sources with INTEGRAL},
author = {V. Sguera and A. Bazzano and A. J. Bird and A. J. Dean and P. Ubertini and E. J. Barlow and L. Bassani and D. J. Clark and A. B. Hill and A. Malizia and M. Molina and J. B. Stephen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0603756},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
46 pages, 21 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ