137,952 research outputs found

    X-Ray Spectral Variability in Cygnus X-1

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    Spectral variability in different energy bands of X-rays from Cyg X-1 in different states is studied with RXTE observations and time domain approaches. In the hard tail of energy spectrum above 10\sim 10 keV, average peak aligned shots are softer than the average steady emission and the hardness ratio decreases when the flux increases during a shot for all states. In regard to a soft band lower 10\sim 10 keV, the hardness in the soft state varies in an opposite way: it peaks when the flux of the shot peaks. For the hard and transition states, the hardness ratio in respect to a soft band during a shot is in general lower than that of the steady component and a sharp rise is observed at about the shot peak. For the soft state, the correlation coefficient between the intensity and hardness ratio in the hard tail is negative and decreases monotonically as the timescale increases from 0.01 s to 50 s, which is opposite to that in regard to a soft band. For the hard and transition states, the correlation coefficients are in general negative and have a trend of decrease with increasing timescale.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, accepted by Ap

    Characterizing Some Gaia Alerts with LAMOST and SDSS

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    Gaia is regularly producing Alerts on objects where photometric variability has been detected. The physical nature of these objects has often to be determined with the complementary observations from ground-based facilities. We have compared the list of Gaia Alerts (until 20181101) with archival LAMOST and SDSS spectroscopic data. The date of the ground-based observation rarely corresponds to the date of the Alert, but this allows at least the identification of the source if it is persistent, or the host galaxy if the object was only transient like a supernova. A list of Gaia Nuclear Transients from Kostrzewa-Rutkowska et al. (2018) has been included in this search also. We found 26 Gaia Alerts with spectra in LAMOST+SDSS labelled as stars (12 with multi-epoch spectra). A majority of them are CVs. Similarly 206 Gaia Alerts have associated spectra labelled as galaxies (49 with multi-epoch spectra). Those spectra were generally obtained on a date different from the Alert date, are mostly emission-line galaxies, leading to the suspicion that most of the Alerts were due to a SN. As for the GNT list, we found 55 associated spectra labelled as galaxies (13 with multi-epoch spectra). In two galaxies, Gaia17aal and GNTJ170213+2543, was the date of the spectroscopic observation close enough to the Alert date: we find a trace of the SN itself in their LAMOST spectrum, both classified here as a type Ia SN. The GNT sample has a higher proportion of AGNs, suggesting that some of the detected variations are also due to the AGN itself. Similar for Quasars, we found 30 Gaia Alerts but 68 GNT cases have single epoch quasar spectra, while 12 plus 23 have multi-epoch spectra. For ten out of these 35, their multi-epoch spectra show appearance or disappearance of the broad Balmer lines and also variations in the continuum, qualifying them as "Changing Look Quasars".Comment: Accepted for publication in APSS, 14 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
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