TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  42946
SUBJECT: EP251202a/GRB 251202A: refined analysis of the EP-WXT observations
DATE:    25/12/02 12:20:05 GMT
FROM:    EP Team at NAOC/CAS <ep_ta@bao.ac.cn>

R. D. Liang (NAOC) Z. M. Wang (BNU), Y. Wu (NJU), Y. J. Zhang (THU), H. N. Yang, H. Sun (NAOC) on behalf of the Einstein Probe (EP) team:  

The fast X-ray transient EP251202a triggered the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) on board the Einstein Probe (EP) mission (Zhang et al., GCN 42937), and was followed by several telescopes (Li et al., GCN 42934, Lipunov et al., GCN 42938 and Zhu et al., GCN 42939, Sbarufatti et al. GCN 42943). The refined analysis of the WXT data shows that the event started at T0=2025-12-02T01:48:23.9 (UTC) and lasted for ~400 s. Three peaks are detected in the lightcurve, whose spectra are characterized by photon indice of 2.33 (-0.90/+1.02), 1.12 (-0.48/+0.60) and 1.19 (-0.51/+1.1), respectively. The average WXT 0.5-4 keV spectrum can be fitted with an absorbed power law with a fixed Galactic hydrogen column density of 6.48 x 10^20 cm^-2 and a photon index of 1.23 (-0.19/+0.19). The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-4 keV flux is 5.40 (-0.63/+0.70) x 10^(-10) erg/s/cm^2. 
 
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).