Speaker
Description
The Living Swift-XRT Point Source Catalogue (LSXPS) is a unique facility: it is updated in near real-time, enabling a sensitive, “live” search for new high-energy transients. This opens up a new area of transient phase-space for exploration, as evidenced by the LSXPS discovery of the enigmatic event Swift J0230. However, the majority of transient candidates detected are faint, classified as “low significance” transients within LSXPS; determining which of these are actually transient, especially where they are close to the XRT detection limit and consequently impacted by the Eddington bias, poses a significant challenge.
We present a simulation-based approach that yields confidence intervals on source flux, corrected for Eddington bias and accounting for the increasing number-density of sources at lower fluxes. This enables more reliable identification of true transients and rejection of those whose apparently increased flux is a measurement effect. From our initial results, at a threshold of 3-sigma, we identify 413 new transients, compared to only 36 with the original approach—an elevenfold increase. This technique will soon be integrated into LSXPS’s real-time analysis, potentially boosting detection rates and advancing high-energy transient astronomy in the TDAMM era.
