INTEGRAL study of temporal properties of bright flares in Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients

Abstract

We have characterized the typical temporal behaviour of the bright X-ray flares detected from the three Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs) showing the most extreme transient behaviour (XTE J1739-302, IGR J17544-2619, SAX J1818.6-1703). We focus here on the cumulative distributions of the waiting-time (time interval between two consecutive X-ray flares), and the duration of the hard X-ray activity (duration of the brightest phase of an SFXT outburst), as observed by INTEGRAL/IBIS in the energy band 17-50 keV. Adopting the cumulative distribution of waiting-times, it is possible to identify the typical time-scale that clearly separates different outbursts, each composed by several single flares at ~ks time-scale. This allowed us to measure the duration of the brightest phase of the outbursts from these three targets, finding that they show heavy-tailed cumulative distributions.We observe a correlation between the total energy emitted during SFXT outbursts and the time interval covered by the outbursts (defined as the elapsed time between the first and the last flare belonging to the same outburst as observed by INTEGRAL). We show that temporal properties of flares and outbursts of the sources, which share common properties regardless different orbital parameters, can be interpreted in the model of magnetized stellar winds with fractal structure from the OB-supergiant stars.