The Swift X-Ray Telescope

By D. Burrows, J. Hill, J. Nousek, A. Wells, A. Short, R. Willingale, O. Citterio, G. Chincarini, G. Tagliaferri. SPIE Optics + Photonics, 2000

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Abstracthe Swift Gamma-Ray Explorer is designed to make prompt multiwavelength observations of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and GRB afterglows. The X-ray telescope (XRT) enables Swift to determine GRB positions with a few arcseconds accuracy within 100 s of the burst onset.The XRT utilizes a mirror set built for JET-X and an XMM-Newton/EPIC MOS CCD detector to provide a sensitive broad-band (0.2–10 keV) X-ray imager with effective area of > 120 cm2 at 1.5 keV, field of view of 23.6 × 23.6 arcminutes, and angular resolution of 18 arcseconds (HPD). The detection sensitivity is 2×10−14 erg cm−2 s−1 in 104 s. The instrument is designed to provide automated source detection and position reporting within 5 s of target acquisition. It can also measure the redshifts of GRBs with Fe line emission or other spectral features. The XRT operates in an auto-exposure mode, adjusting the CCD readout mode automatically to optimize the science return for each frame as the source intensity fades. The XRT will measure spectra and lightcurves of the GRB afterglow beginning about a minute after the burst and will follow each burst for days or weeks.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

• Unveiling the origin of X-ray flares in gamma-ray bursts (2010, methodology): “Swift/XRT (Burrows et al. 2005a) is designed to acquire data using different observing modes depending on source count rates to minimize the presence of pile-up (Hill et al. 2004): the first orbit contains Windowed Timing (WT) data if the source is brighter than a few counts s−1, while for lower…”
• An Embedded X-Ray Source Shines through the Aspherical AT 2018cow: Revealing the Inner Workings of the Most Luminous Fast-evolving Optical Transients (2018, background): “Soft X-Rays: Swift-XRT and XMM-Newton The X-Ray Telescope (XRT) on board the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (Gehrels et al. 2004; Burrows et al. 2005) started observing AT 2018cow on 2018 June 19 (∼3 days following discovery).”
• The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets (2014, background): “The X-ray flares are usually interpreted as due to re-start of GRB central engine because of their short rise time of δtobs/tobs 1 (Burrows et al., 2005b; Zhang et al., 2006; Fan and Wei, 2005).”
• Properties of flat-spectrum radio-loud Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies (2014, methodology): “We analysed data of the X-Ray Telescope (XRT, Burrows et al. 2005) and the Ultraviolet Optical Telescope (UVOT, Roming et al. 2005).”
• TeV BL Lac objects at the dawn of the Fermi era (2009, methodology): “Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT: Burrows et al. 2005) and Swift UV/Optical Telescope (UVOT: Roming et al. 2005) data have been reduced using the standard procedure (described in Ghisellini et al. 2007), with the latest version of the HEASOFT (6.6.3) and CALDB (2009/5/6) packages.4 XRT data have been…”
• A Comprehensive Analysis of Swift XRT Data. II. Diverse Physical Origins of the Shallow Decay Segment (2007, background): “In its first two years of operation, the on-board X-ray telescope (XRT; Burrows et al. 2004) has accumulated a large set of well-sampled X-ray light curves from tens of seconds to days (even months) since the GRB triggers.”
• Six months of multiwavelength follow-up of the tidal disruption candidate asassn-14li and implied tde rates from asas-sn (2015, neutral): “In addition to this follow-up spectrum, follow-up photometry of the source obtained on 2014 November 30 with the Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT; Burrows et al. 2005) and UVOT showed strong soft X-ray emission and ultraviolet emission from a location consistent with the host nucleus.”
• Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b (2005, neutral): “We examine the absolute astrometric accuracy of the Swift XRT frame by searching for possible counterparts of the other 21 XRT sources in deep optical images.”
• Growing supermassive black holes in the late stages of galaxy mergers are heavily obscured (2017, methodology): “3.4 Swift XRT and BAT Data from the X-ray telescope (XRT, Burrows et al. 2005) on board Swift were used only for IRASF05054+1718.”
• Simultaneous Planck, Swift, and Fermi observations of X-ray and γ-ray selected blazars (2011, background): “The Swift XRT is usually operated in “auto-state” mode, which automatically adjusts the CCD read-out mode to the source brightness, in an attempt to avoid pile-up (Burrows et al. 2005; Hill et al. 2004).”
• Methods and results of an automatic analysis of a complete sample of Swift-XRT observations of GRBs (2008, methodology): “…Gamma rays: bursts – X-rays: observations – Methods: data analysis – Catalogues 1 INTRODUCTION The Swift satellite (Gehrels et al. 2004) has revolutionised our understanding of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs), and the X-ray telescope (XRT, Burrows et al. 2005) has played a major role in this process.”
• The IceCube Realtime Alert System (2016, methodology): “9) receive up to 7 alerts per year, while the Swift-XRT ( θ A = 0 .”
• The fast, luminous ultraviolet transient AT2018cow: extreme supernova, or disruption of a star by an intermediate-mass black hole? (2018, methodology): “Data were collected with both the Ultraviolet-Optical Telescope (UVOT; Roming et al. 2005) and the X-ray Telescope (XRT; Burrows et al. 2005).”
• The X-Ray Telescope onboard Suzaku (2007, methodology): “The idea of a thin-foil-nested telescope has been successfully implemented for the X-ray telescopes onboard Beppo-SAX (Conti et al. 1994), XMM-Newton (Aschenbach 2002; Lumb et al. 2003), and Swift (Burrows et al. 2005).”
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, methodology): “We used a fixed aperture at the ZTF coordinate of the transient, and converted to flux using the best-fit blackbody model to the stacked XRT spectrum.”
• Swift observations of the very intense flaring activity of Mrk 421 during 2006. I. Phenomenological picture of electron acceleration and predictions for MeV/GeV emission (2009, methodology): “When the target count-rate is higher than ≈1 cts/s the system is operated normally in Windowed Timing (WT) mode, whereas the Photon Counting (PC) mode is used for fainter sources (see Burrows et al. 2005; Hill et al. 2004, for more details on XRT observing modes).”