Different Types of X‐Ray Bursts from GRS 1915+105 and Their Origin

The Astrophysical Journal1999Vol. 517(2), pp. 935–950

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 1999 papers

J. S. Yadav, A. R. Rao, P. C. Agrawal, B. Paul, S. Seetha, K. Kasturirangan

Abstract

We report the X-ray observations of the Galactic X-ray transient source GRS 1915+105 with the PPCs of the Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment(IXAE) onboard the Indian satellite IRS-P3 during 1997 June - August, which have revealed the presence of four types of intense X-ray bursts. All the observed bursts have a slow exponential rise, a sharp linear decay, and they can broadly be put in two classes: irregular and quasi-regular bursts in one class, and regular bursts in another class. The regular bursts are found to have two distinct time scales and they persist over extended durations. There is a strong correlation between the preceding quiescent time and the burst duration for the quasi-regular and irregular bursts. No such correlation is found for the regular bursts. The ratio of average flux during the burst time to the average flux during the quiescent phase is high and variable for the quasi- regular and irregular bursts while it is low and constant for the regular bursts. We suggest that the peculiar bursts that we have seen are charact- eristic of the change of state of the source. The source can switch back and forth between the low-hard state and the high-soft state near critical accretion rates in a very short time scale. A test of the model is presented using the publicly available 13-60 keV RXTE/PCA data for irregular and regular bursts concurrent with our observations.

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 1999 papers

Abstract

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