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Analyzing short-term X-ray variability of Cygnus X-1 with Linear State Space Models

1998/02/26 by K. Pottschmidt, M. Koenig, Pottschmidt, K. +6
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Superconducting Materials and Applications #astro-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9802339

9 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, also available at http://astro.uni-tuebingen.de/publications/

arxiv created 1998/02/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01

Abstract

Cyg X-1 exhibits irregular X-ray variability on all measured timescales. The usually applied shot noise models describe the typical short-term behavior of this source by superposition of randomly occuring shots with a distribution of shot durations. We have reanalyzed EXOSAT ME observations of Cyg X-1 using the more general Linear State Space Models (LSSMs). These models, which explicitly take the observation-noise into account, model the intrinsic system variability with an autoregressive (AR) process. Our fits show that an AR process of first order can reproduce the system variability of Cyg X-1. A possible interpretation is again the superposition of individual shots, but with a single relaxation timescale tau. This parameter was found to be 0.19s.

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