TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 40085 SUBJECT: EP250404a: refined analysis of the EP-WXT and EP-FXT observations DATE: 25/04/06 09:45:07 GMT FROM: EP Team at NAOC/CAS ep_ta@bao.ac.cn
Y.-H. I. Yin (NJU), J. W. Hu (NAO, CAS), Y. L. Hua (PMO, CAS), Q. C. Liu (THU), B. B. Zhang (BNU), Y. Liu (NAO, CAS) on behalf of the Einstein Probe (EP) team:
The X-ray transient EP250404a was detected by the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) on board the Einstein Probe (EP) mission (Hu et al., GCN 40051), and followed up by several telescopes (Jiang et al, GCN 40052, Perez-Garcia et al, GCN 40053, Du et al, GCN 40058, Zhu et al, GCN 40061, Konno et al, GCN 40063, Odeh et al, GCN 40064, Lipunov et al, GCN 40066, He et al, GCN 40069, Pérez-Fournon et al, GCN 40071, Jelinek et al, GCN 40072, Rakotondrainibe et al, GCN 40073, Taguchi et al, GCN 40074, Brivio et al, GCN 40075, Ruocco et al, GCN 70076, Martin-Carrillo et al, GCN 40080, Pavoni et al, GCN 40083, Li et al, GCN 40084), with an optical counterpart detected at a redshift of 2.63 (Zhu et al, GCN 40061, Li et al, GCN 40084). Refined analysis of the WXT data shows that the event started at T0=2025-04-04T14:19:45 (UTC) and lasted for about 16 s before the observation was interrupted by the autonomous follow-up observation. The average WXT 0.5-4 keV spectrum can be fitted with an absorbed power law with a photon index of 0.41 (-0.28/+0.26). The absorption is fixed at the best-fit values from FXT spectral fitting with a Galactic hydrogen column density of 6.00 x 10^20 cm^-2 and an intrinsic hydrogen column density of 4.89 x 10^22 cm^-2. The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-4 keV flux is 5.9 (-1.6/+2.2) x 10^(-8) erg/s/cm^2. The data recovered from the slew process shows that the transient event lasted for about 300 seconds.
The Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT) on board EP observed this source autonomously about 1 min after T0, starting at 2025-04-04T14:20:46 (UTC). Within the WXT error circle, on-ground analysis of the FXT data found an uncatalogued source at R.A. = 125.0601, DEC = 35.5284 (J2000) with an uncertainty of 10 arcsec (radius, 90% C.L. statistical and systematic), which is also consistent with the position of the optical counterpart. The average 0.5-10 keV spectrum can be fitted with an absorbed power law with a Galactic hydrogen column density of 6.00 x 10^20 cm^-2 and an intrinsic hydrogen column density of 4.89 (-0.45/+0.33) x 10^22 cm^-2. The photon index is 2.18 (-0.03/+0.03). The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-10 keV flux is 9.00 (-0.25/+0.19) x 10^(-10) erg/s/cm^2. The uncertainties are at the 90% confidence level for the above parameters.
Launched on January 9, 2024, EP is a space X-ray observatory to monitor the soft X-ray sky with X-ray follow-up capability (Yuan et al. 2022, Handbook of X-ray and Gamma-ray Astrophysics).
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