TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  39513
SUBJECT: EP250226a/GRB 250226A: refined analysis of the EP-WXT and FXT observations
DATE:    25/02/27 09:18:11 GMT
FROM:    EP Team at NAOC/CAS <ep_ta@bao.ac.cn>

S. Q. Jiang (NAO, CAS), B.-T. Wang (YNAO, CAS), H. Z. Wu (HUST), T. Zhao, Y. J. Song, Y. Liu (NAO, CAS) report on behalf of the Einstein Probe team:

The X-ray transient EP250226a/GRB 250226A triggered the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) on board the Einstein Probe (EP) mission (Jiang et al., GCN 39482), which is also detected by Fermi/GBM (Fermi GBM team, GCN 39479), GECAM-B (Zhang et al., GCN 39492) and INTEGRAL/SPI-ACS (triNum #11070), and followed by several optical telescopes (An et al., GCN 39486, Magnani et al., GCN 39488, Li et al., GCN 39489, Aryan et al., GCN 39509, Zou et al., GCN 39511) at the redshift of 3.315 (Zhu et al., GCN 39487). The refined analysis of the WXT data shows that the event started at 2025-02-26T06:34:54 (UTC) and lasted for 22 s with the peak flux of 9.8 x 10^(-9) erg/s/cm^2, before the observation was interrupted by the autonomous follow-up observation. 

The autonomous observation by the Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT) was performed about 44 minutes later as blocked by the Earth. The on-ground analysis shows that an uncatalogued source was detected at R.A. = 224.2641, DEC = 20.9754 (J2000) with an uncertainty of about 10 arcsec (radius, 90% C.L. statistical and systematic). The average FXT 0.5-10 keV spectrum can be fitted with an absorbed power law with a Galactic equivalent hydrogen column density of 3.7 x 10^20 cm^-2 and a photon index of 2.07 (-/+0.06). The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-10 keV flux is 2.89 (-/+0.08) x 10^(-11) erg/s/cm^2. Further FXT observation performed at about 11.9 hours after the trigger showed an average unabsorbed 0.5-10 keV flux is 1.83 (-/+0.18) x 10^(-12) 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).