Informazioni sull’evento

02/09/2018

Joint Astrophysical Colloquium

Surveying the transient hard X-ray sky

Tony Bird (Univ. of Southampton)

Thursday 05/09/2019 @ 15:00, Sala IV piano Battiferro

Hard X-ray surveys from the wide-field instruments on long-duration missions like INTEGRAL and Swift provide us with superb coverage of the evolution of the hard X-ray sky over nearly 20 years. The sky coverage of imagers like INTEGRAL/IBIS and Swift/BAT ensure multi-epoch measurements of all sources such that both persistent and variable emission can be observed. The long duration and high sensitivity of the INTEGRAL mission has given rise to new methods to optimise the detection and extraction of faint persistent and transient sources within the dataset. Hard X-ray sources show a remarkable variety in their temporal variability characteristics, and both blind and tuned search techniques can be used to find them. I will discuss some highlights of sources discovered so far, an overview of the analysis methods used to date, and a discussion of the challenges presented by the ever-increasing dataset together with some of the new approaches being developed to tackle them.