GCN Circular 43264
Subject
EP251229a: refined analysis of the EP-WXT and EP-FXT observations
Event
Date
2025-12-30T09:05:29Z (11 hours ago)
From
EP Team at NAOC/CAS <ep_ta@bao.ac.cn>
Via
Web form
B.T. Wang (YNAO, CAS), J.P. Chen (SYSU), D. Zhu, K.J. Zhang (YNU), and Z.X. Ling (NAO, CAS) on behalf of the Einstein Probe (EP) team:
The fast X-ray transient EP251229a triggered the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) on board the Einstein Probe (EP) mission (Wang et al., GCN 43253) and followed by an optical telescope (Lipunov et al., GCN 43254). The refined analysis of the WXT data shows that the event started at T0=2025-12-29T19:54:09 (UTC) and lasted for 173 s with a single pulse. The average WXT 0.5-4 keV spectrum can be fitted with an absorbed power law with a Galactic hydrogen column density of 5.3 (-2.2/+2.6) x 10^21 cm^-2 and a photon index of 2.3 (-0.68/+0.77). The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-4 keV flux is 1.62 (-0.41/+0.87) x 10^(-9) erg/s/cm^2.
The autonomous observation by the Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT) was performed at 2025-12-29T20:01:28 (UTC), about 7 minutes after T0. The exposure time of this observation is 855 s. The on-ground analysis shows that an uncatalogued source was detected at R.A., Dec. = 124.1027, 37.2068 deg (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 fixed Galactic equivalent hydrogen column density of 6.0 x 10^20 cm^-2 and a photon index of 1.89 (-0.13/+0.13). The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-10 keV flux is 3.46 (-0.37/+0.40) x 10^(-11) 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).