GCN Circular 8265

Y.E. Nakagawa (RIKEN), K. Yamaoka, A. Yoshida (AGU),
T. Enoto, K. Nakazawa (U. Tokyo), K. Makishima (U. Tokyo/RIKEN),
N. Rea (U. Amsterdam), P. Esposito (INAF/IASF),
T. Sakamoto (GSFC/UMBC), and K. Hurley (U.C. Berkeley),
on behalf of the Suzaku SGR ToO team, report:

We report on a Suzaku ToO observation of the new soft gamma-ray
repeater SGR 0501+4516 (Holland et al. GCN #8112, Barthelmy et al.
GCN #8113), started on 2008-08-26 00:05 UT, for an exposure time of
about 43 ksec (Mitsuda et al. GCN #8136). A bright point source was
clearly detected in the XIS CCDs at a position consistent with that of
SGR 0501+4516 (Evans et al. GCN #8148).

From a preliminary analysis of the XIS data, the 1-10 keV persistent
emission spectrum is well fit by a black body with a temperature of 
0.7 keV, plus a power-law with a photon index of 2.9, absorbed by a 
hydrogen column density of 1.0x10^22 cm^-2. The absorbed 1-10 keV flux 
was (3.7+/-0.1)x10^-11 erg/cm^2/s. The XIS data confirm the source
pulsations at a period of P = 5.762 +/- 0.001 s, consistent with the
periodicity derived by the RXTE/PCA (Gogus et al. GCN #8118),
Swift/XRT (Mangano et al. GCN #8146), and XMM-Newton (Rea et al. Atel
#1688; Israel et al. Atel #1692)

At least 16 short bursts were detected during the observation.
The largest burst was observed on 2008-08-26 03:16:16 by all Suzaku's
instruments including Suzaku-WAM, up to an energy of ~200 keV. The HXD 
spectral analysis of the persistent and burst emission is in progress.

We would like to thank the Suzaku managers and the operation team
for approving and carrying out the ToO observation.