Unveiling Supergiant Fast X-Ray Transient Sources with INTEGRAL

By S. V., Bazzano A B, Bird A J, Dean A J, Ubertini P, Barlow E J, B. L., Clark D J, Hill A B, M. A. and 2 more. 2006

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 that have been labeled supergiant fast X-ray transients (SFXTs), since 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. For one of them in particular, IGR J11215-5952, we observe fast X-ray transient behavior for the first time. The remaining six sources (IGR J16479-4514, IGR J16418-4532, IGR J16195-4945=AX J161929-4945, XTE J1743-363, AX J1749.1-2733, and IGR J17407-2808) are still unclassified; however, they can be considered candidate SFXTs because of their similarity to the known SFXTs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b81141ffef8142bc4b8d601bab73c9a1155378eb

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. S. Tsygankov
3. Joshua S. Bloom
4. M. Falanga
5. E. Bozzo
6. L. Stella
7. C. Markwardt
8. A. Lutovinov

Citations in the corpus

• THE SWIFT/BAT HARD X-RAY TRANSIENT MONITOR (2006, methodology): “Among HMXBs we have the candidate SFXT IGR J16418−4532 (Sguera et al. 2006) with a 3.75-day orbital period discovered in Swift/BAT and RXTE/PCA light curves (Corbet et al. 2006), which had a flare in the BAT in 2011 (Romano et al. 2012a).”
• Probing clumpy stellar winds with a neutron star (2007, background): “The fast transient systems are characterized by fast outbursts, by a low quiescent luminosity and by super-giant OB companions (Sguera et al. 2006; Negueruela et al. 2007).”
• Are There Magnetars in High-Mass X-Ray Binaries? The Case of Supergiant Fast X-Ray Transients (2008, background): “On the contrary, in the prototypical SFXTs XTE J1739-302 (Sguera et al. 2006) and IGR J16479-4514 (Walter et al. 2006) some evidence has been reported for periodicities in the ∼1000-2000 s range.”
• High-mass X-ray binaries in the Milky Way (2013, background): “The fast flaring activity detected from this source with INTEGRAL led Sguera et al. (2006b) to associate this source with the SFXT class (see also Morris et al., 2009a).”
• INTEGRAL/IBIS all-sky survey in hard X-rays (2007, unknown): “…(5) Brandt et al. (2005), (6) Sunyaev et al. (2003a), (7) Masetti et al. (2006e), (8) Masetti et al. (2006b), (9) Bassani et al. (2006), (10) Sguera et al. (2006), (11) Lutovinov et al. (2004a), (12) Lubinski et al. (2005), (13) den Hartog et al. (2004a), (14) Grebenev et al. (2004b), (15)…”