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Sources of the X-Ray Background: Temporal Stability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2015

Elihu Boldt*
Affiliation:
Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 U.S.A.

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The A2 experiment on HEAO-1 was especially developed to make systematics-free measurements of the extragalactic X-ray background (Boldt et al. 1979) over the band (up to 60 keV) of maximum flux. The spectrum observed has a remarkably simple thermal form (Marshall et al. 1980) with a mean photon energy of about 40 keV, an order of magnitude above the high-energy limit of the Einstein Observatory (HEAO-2) telescope. If most of this hard X-ray flux is not diffuse, then the main sources of this background could be 1) unresolved objects of known classification (e.g. BL Lac type, quasars, active galaxies) at high redshift, 2) redshifted (z > 1) gamma-ray bursts and/or 3) a new class of X-ray objects peculiar to high redshifts. If we assume that the number of such sources that are highly variable is less than 106, then our first-cut analysis of the temporal stability measured for the X-ray background indicates that 1) their contribution is less than 15% if they are variable on scales less than 104 seconds, and 2) their contribution is less than 60% if they are variable on scales less than a half-year.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1980 

References

Boldt, E., Marshall, F., Mushotzky, R., Holt, S., Rothschild, R., and Serlemitsos, P., in Proceedings of COSPAR/IAU Symposium on X-ray Astronomy (edited by Baity, W. and Peterson, L.) Pergamon Press: Oxford and New York, p. 443, 1979.Google Scholar
Marshall, F., Boldt, E., Holt, S., Miller, R., Mushotzky, R., Rose, L.A., Rothschild, R., and Serlemitsos, P., 1980, Ap. J., in press.Google Scholar