Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2004-12-09
Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 357 (2005) 1211-1218
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
9 pages, 5 figures, to appear in MNRAS, figures with full resolution are available at http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~mas/research
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2005.08717.x
We report the discovery in the Galactic Centre region of two hard X-ray sources, designated as XMM J174457-2850.3 and XMM J174544-2913.0, which exhibited flux variations in the 2--10 keV band in excess of a factor of 100 in observations spanning roughly a year. In both cases the observed hydrogen column density is consistent with a location near to the Galactic Centre, implying peak X-ray luminosities of ~5 x 10^34 erg/s. These objects may represent a new population of transient source with very different properties to the much more luminous Galactic Centre transients associated with neutron star and black-hole binary systems. Spectral analysis shows that XMM J174457-2850.3 has relatively weak iron-line emission set against a very hard continuum. XMM J174544-2913.0, on the other hand, has an extremely strong K-line from helium-like iron with an equivalent width of ~2.4keV. The nature of the latter source is of particular interest. Does it represent an entirely new class of object or does it correspond to a known class of source in a very extreme configuration?
Decourchelle Anne
Sakano Masaaki
Wang Daniel Q.
Warwick Robert S.
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