IAC Colloquium today by Peter G. Jonker; Tuesday May 13 2025, 10:30
Seminarios del IAC
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
IAC seminars
The origin of Fast X-ray Transients
Prof. Peter G. Jonker (Radboud University)Tuesday May 13 2025, 10:30 GMT+1 (Aula) - Live streaming Zoom link
Fast X-ray Transients (FXTs) are minute-to-hours long flashes of X-rays, first discovered serendipitously in X-ray satellite data (mainly Chandra and XMM-Newton). They are proven to be caused by energetic extra-galactic phenomena. Currently, Einstein Probe is revolutionizing the field by discovering many FXTs and, crucially, by their low-latency announcement thereof. These extra-galactic FXTs are ubiquitous: their density rate is several hundred per year per Mpc^3. FXTs have been proposed to arise from double neutron star mergers, tidal disruption events involving an intermediate-mass black hole and a white dwarf, and from off-axis or sub-luminous gamma-ray bursts. Brief extra-galactic FXTs also arise in supernova shock breakouts. Contemporaneous multi-wavelength detections pos sible only in the current Einstein Probe era show that FXTs originate from more than 1 progenitor. I will discuss the most recent findings and provide some (potential) science questions to be answered using FXT observations.
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