Academic Journal

Swift follow-up observations of unclassified ASCA sources

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Swift follow-up observations of unclassified ASCA sources
المؤلفون: N. Degenaar, R.L.C. Starling, P.A. Evans, A.P. Beardmore, D.N. Burrows, E.M. Cackett, S. Campana, D. Grupe, J. Kennea, A. Moretti, C. Pagani, K.L. Page, V. La Parola, R. Wijnands
المصدر: Astronomy & Astrophysics (00046361) vol.540 (2012) p.A22
سنة النشر: 2012
المجموعة: Universiteit van Amsterdam: Digital Academic Repository (UvA DARE)
الوصف: We present Swift follow-up observations of a sample of 35 unclassified faint X-ray sources drawn from the ASCA Galactic centre and Galactic plane surveys. Our short, pointed XRT observations allow detections down to a limiting 0.3-10 keV flux of FX ~ 10-13 erg cm-2 s-1, which translates into a luminosity of LX ~ 1033 erg s-1 for an assumed distance of D = 8 kpc. The brightest source in our sample reaches a maximum 0.3-10 keV luminosity of LX ~ 2 × 1036 (D/8 kpc)2 erg s-1 during our Swift observations. We detect 16 (46%) of the ASCA sources with the XRT, while 19 were not detected during our program. Since we are probing the faint end of the ASCA source populations, we expect a large fraction of the non-detections to be due to the Eddington bias. This is strengthened by the fact that we find the observed XRT count rates to be predominantly lower than expected based on the reported ASCA intensities. Nevertheless, investigation of the ASCA properties and any possible long-term X-ray variability leads us to conclude that the non-detections likely include two spurious ASCA detections and three objects that are highly variable or transient X-ray sources. For the 16 XRT-detected sources we obtain positional accuracies of ~2−4′′, which significantly improves upon their ASCA uncertainties of ~1′. We use the X-ray spectra and variability to characterise these objects. Most appear to be faint, persistent X-ray emitters that have highly absorbed spectra. Based on their X-ray properties we identify three accreting compact objects: one confirmed (AX J1754.2-2754) and one candidate (AX J1538.3-5541) X-ray binary, and one possible magnetically accreting white dwarf (AX J1620.1-5002). Furthermore, we use the improved positions of XRT-detected sources to search for counterparts in simultaneously obtained Swift/UVOT images and possible associations with catalogued sources at various wavelengths. This reveals three possible main sequence stars amongst our sample. The other sources remain unclassified, but our improved XRT positions ...
نوع الوثيقة: article in journal/newspaper
اللغة: English
Relation: http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.381922
الاتاحة: http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.381922
Rights: It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content licence (like Creative Commons).
رقم الانضمام: edsbas.CA55924F
قاعدة البيانات: BASE