1998/09/30 by Chryssa Kouveliotou, C. Kouveliotou, Tod Strohmayer +12 · 13 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Dipole #Flux (metallurgy) #Gamma ray #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Magnetar #Period (music) #Physics #Pulsar #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Repeater (horology) #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/311813
published as Astrophys.J. 510 (1999) L115-118 · LaTeX 15 pages plus 5 figures. Accepted by ApJ Letters
arxiv created 1998/11/25 · openalex publication_date 1999/01/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2020/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The soft gamma repeater SGR 1900+14 became active again on 1998 June after a long period of quiescence; it remained at a low state of activity until 1998 August, when it emitted a series of extraordinarily intense outbursts. We have observed the source with the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer twice, during the onset of each active episode. We confirm the pulsations at the 5.16 s period reported earlier from SGR 1900+14. Here we report the detection of a secular spin-down of the pulse period at an average rate of 1.1 × 10 -10 s s -1 . In view of the strong similarities between SGRs, we attribute the spin-down of SGR 1900+14 to magnetic dipole radiation, possibly accelerated by a quiescent flux, as in the case of SGR 1806-20. This allows an estimate of the pulsar dipolar magnetic field, which is (2–8) × 10 14 G. Our results confirm that SGRs are magnetars.