J/A+A/650/A167 EXTraS project. New transient sources (De Luca+, 2021)
The EXTraS project: Exploring the X-ray transient and variable sky.
De Luca A., Salvaterra R., Belfiore A., Carpano S., D'Agostino D.,
Haberl F., Israel G.L., Law-Green D., Lisini G., Marelli M., Novara G.,
Read A.M., Rodriguez-Castillo G., Rosen S.R., Salvetti D., Tiengo A.,
Vianello G., Watson M.G., Delvaux C., Dickens T., Esposito P., Greiner J.,
Hammerle H., Kreikenbohm A., Kreykenbohm S., Oertel M., Pizzocaro D.,
Pye J.P., Sandrelli S., Stelzer B., Wilms J., Zagaria F.
<Astron. Astrophys., 650, A167 (2021)>
=2021A&A...650A.167D 2021A&A...650A.167D (SIMBAD/NED BibCode)
ADC_Keywords: X-ray sources
Keywords: X-rays: general - methods: data analysis -
astronomical databases: miscellaneous - catalogs
Abstract:
Temporal variability in flux and spectral shape is ubiquitous in the
X-ray sky and carries crucial information about the nature and
emission physics of the sources. The EPIC instrument on board the
XMM-Newton observatory is the most powerful tool for studying
variability even in faint sources. Each day, it collects a large
amount of information about hundreds of new serendipitous sources, but
the resulting huge (and growing) dataset is largely unexplored in the
time domain. The project called Exploring the X-ray transient and
variable sky (EXTraS) systematically extracted all temporal domain
information in the XMM-Newton archive. This included a search and
characterisation of variability, both periodic and aperiodic, in
hundreds of thousands of sources spanning more than eight orders of
magnitude in timescale and six orders of magnitude in flux, and a
search for fast transients that were missed by standard image
analysis. All results, products, and software tools have been released
to the community in a public archive. A science gateway has also been
implemented to allow users to run the EXTraS analysis remotely on
recent XMM datasets. We give details on the new algorithms that were
designed and implemented to perform all steps of EPIC data analysis,
including data preparation, source and background modelling,
generation of time series and power spectra, and search for and
characterisation of different types of variabilities. We describe our
results and products and give information about their basic
statistical properties and advice on their usage. We also describe
available online resources. The EXTraS database of results and its
ancillary products is a rich resource for any kind of investigation in
almost all fields of astrophysics. Algorithms and lessons learnt from
our project are also a very useful reference for any current and
future experiment in the time domain.
Description:
We give in Table B.1 the full list of the 136 new transients
discovered by the dedicated analysis described in Sect. 5.
File Summary:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ReadMe 80 . This file
tableb1.dat 68 136 136 new transient sources discovered by the
dedicated analysis described in Sect. 5
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See also:
https://www88.lamp.le.ac.uk/extras/archive : EXTraS Home Page
Byte-by-byte Description of file: tableb1.dat
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1- 4 A4 --- --- [EXMM]
6- 21 A16 --- EXMM EXTraS transient ID, JHHMMSS.s+DDMMSS (1)
23- 32 I10 --- ObsID XMM observation ID
34- 41 F8.4 deg GLON Galactic longitude
43- 50 F8.4 deg GLAT Galactic latitude
52- 54 F3.1 arcsec e_pos Overall uncertainty on the position
56- 61 F6.1 s Dur Transient duration
63- 65 I3 ct Ct EPIC counts (0.1-12keV)
67- 68 I2 ct e_Ct EPIC counts (0.1-12keV) error
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note (1): Sources are sorted by increasing duration of the transient.
See Sect. 5 for more details.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
History:
From electronic version of the journal
(End) Patricia Vannier [CDS] 17-Aug-2021