GCN Circular 43682
Subject
GRB 260208B: refined analysis of the EP-FXT observation
Event
Date
2026-02-10T12:51:13Z (15 hours ago)
From
EP Team at NAOC/CAS <ep_ta@bao.ac.cn>
Via
Web form
S. Q. Jiang, H. N. Yang, Y. L. Wang, Y. Liu (NAO, CAS), Z. H. Yang, Q. C. Zhao (IHEP, CAS) on behalf of the Einstein Probe (EP) team:
EP-FXT performed a follow-up observation on GRB 260208B (The Fermi GBM team, GCN 43638; Preis & Greiner, GCN 43639; Longo et al., GCN 43647; Sonawane et al., GCN 43649; Luo et al., GCN 43650; Harsha et al., GCN 43677) at 2026-02-09T06:37:35 (UTC), about 20.748 hours after the Fermi/GBM trigger.
With a 4.6 ks exposure, the afterglow (Li et al., GCN 43659; Magnani et al., GCN 43668; Beardmore et al., GCN 43671) is clearly detected by EP-FXT.
The average 0.5-10 keV spectrum can be fitted with an absorbed power law with a fixed Galactic hydrogen column density of 4.3 × 10^21 cm^-2, and a photon index of 2.01 (-0.21/+0.21). The derived average unabsorbed 0.5-10 keV flux is 7.28 (-0.81/+0.97) × 10^(-13) erg/s/cm^2. The uncertainties are at the 90% confidence level for the above parameters.
Compared to the flux reported by Swift/XRT (Beardmore et al., GCN 43671), the temporal decay index is approximately -1.4.
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).