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RE J1255+266—Detection of an Extremely Bright EUV Transient

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Michael Dahlem
Michael Dahlem*
Affiliation:
Space Telescope Science Institute†, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

Abstract

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During a pointed ROSAT observation in the direction of the Coma cluster of galaxies an exceptionally bright EUV source, RE J1255+266, was detected serendipitously. The source is located close to the Galactic North pole, at bII ~ 89°. Its observed EUV flux (62-110 eV) at the time of the detection was of order 7 × 10−9 ergs s−1 cm−2, making RE J1255+266 temporarily one of the brightest EUV sources on the sky.

The EUV flare of RE J1255+266 has a light curve with a decay time of about 0.86 days. With respect to earlier non-detections, the source brightened by a factor of > 7000. Such a behavior has not been observed before. Thus, it is unclear what type of source RE J1255+266 might be. The most likely optical counterpart is a faint (V ~ 18.5 mag) object with a blue spectrum (taken from an objective-prism Schmidt plate). For more details on the optical identification see the paper by J. Pye (this conference).

Simultaneous observations with CGRO/BATSE resulted in non-detections of the source in the 8-50 keV energy range.

Type
XI. Searching for New EUV Sources and Transients
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 152: Astrophysics in the Extreme Ultraviolet , 1996 , pp. 471 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1996

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