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arXiv · 2601.14375

Fast X-ray transients in NuSTAR data

Murray Brightman·Joahan Castañeda Jaimes·Daniel Stern·Brian Grefenstette
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Abstract

Fast X-ray transients (FXTs) are flashes of X-rays that last for a few hundreds of seconds to a few hours. An enigmatic population of these transients that did not have a clear origin has been known for several decades, mostly found serendipitously in soft X-ray imaging observations. Recent progress in this field by Einstein Probe has found that many FXTs are associated with gamma-ray bursts and the collapse of massive stars. Motivated by this, we searched the NuSTAR archive in the harder 3--79 keV band for $\sim1000$ s duration transients. From 204 Ms of exposure we present five candidate FXTs, four of which are spectrally hard, with power-law indices $-3<\Gamma<0$, standing them apart from FXTs discovered in the soft band. Three have potential associations with galaxies at $z=0.1-2$, implying 3--79 keV luminosities of $10^{43}$ to $10^{48}$ erg s$^{-1}$ and volumetric event rates of 125--2900 Gpc$^{-3}$ yr$^{-1}$. The properties of these NuSTAR FXTs most resemble low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts, and would be much more common than their higher-luminosity counterparts in this redshift range.

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Murray Brightman, Joahan Castañeda Jaimes, Daniel Stern, Brian Grefenstette. 2026-01-20. Fast X-ray transients in NuSTAR data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14375

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