Spectroscopic and Temporal Properties of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients with Swift

Details Spectroscopic and Temporal Properties of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients with Swift Spectroscopic and Temporal Properties of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients with Swift

Sep 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011head...12.4403r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #12, #44.03

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We present a review of the Swift Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXT) project. Swift has recently opened a brand new way of investigating this class of High-Mass X-ray Binaries whose optical counterparts are O or B supergiant stars, and whose X-ray outbursts are about 4 orders of magnitude brighter than the quiescent state. Thanks to its scheduling flexibility, Swift has allowed us to regularly monitor a small sample of SFXTs with 2-3 observations per week (1-2 ks) with the X-Ray Telescope (XRT) over their entire visibility period (9 months/year) for over 2 years. This intense monitoring has allowed us to study them throughout all phases of their lives (outbursts, intermediate level, and quiescence) and to determine the long-term properties and their duty cycles, through very sensitive and non-serendipitous observations. We also monitored one source along its whole orbital period. Furthermore, thanks to its autonomous and rapid repointing, Swift has allowed us for the first time to catch and study, from optical to hard X-ray, the bright outbursts, and to follow them in the X-ray for days, thus determining the actual duration of the outburst episodes and the shape of their X-ray spectra through simultaneous broadband spectroscopy.
We acknowledge financial contribution from the agreement ASI-INAF I/009/10/0.

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