Unveiling Supergiant Fast X‐Ray Transient Sources with INTEGRAL

  • Sguera V
  • Bazzano A
  • Bird A
  • et al.
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Abstract

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. © 2006. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

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Sguera, V., Bazzano, A., Bird, A. J., Dean, A. J., Ubertini, P., Barlow, E. J., … Stephen, J. B. (2006). Unveiling Supergiant Fast X‐Ray Transient Sources with INTEGRAL. The Astrophysical Journal, 646(1), 452–463. https://doi.org/10.1086/504827

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