A Systematic Chandra study of Sgr A$^{\star}$: I. X-ray flare detection

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes 13 years of Chandra X-ray observations of Sgr A* to detect and characterize 82 flares, revealing no long-term variation in quiescent emission or flare rate, and highlighting short-term clustering of flares.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of statistical methods for flare detection that accounts for pile-up effects and provides a comprehensive analysis of flare properties over 14 years.

Findings

Detected 82 X-ray flares, including faint ones previously unseen.

Found no significant long-term variation in quiescent emission or flare rate.

Identified short-term clustering of flares on 20-70 ks timescales.

Abstract

Daily X-ray flaring represents an enigmatic phenomenon of Sgr A$^{\star}$ --- the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. We report initial results from a systematic X-ray study of this phenomenon, based on extensive {\it Chandra} observations obtained from 1999 to 2012, totaling about 4.5 Ms. We detect flares, using a combination of the maximum likelihood and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, which allow for a direct accounting for the pile-up effect in the modeling of the flare lightcurves and an optimal use of the data, as well as the measurements of flare parameters, including their uncertainties. A total of 82 flares are detected. About one third of them are relatively faint, which were not detected previously. The observation-to-observation variation of the quiescent emission has an average root-mean-square of $6\%-14\%$, including the Poisson statistical fluctuation of faint flares below our detection limits. We find no significant long-term variation in the quiescent emission and the flare rate over the 14 years. In particular, we see no evidence of changing quiescent emission and flare rate around the pericenter passage of the S2 star around 2002. We show clear evidence of a short-term clustering for the ACIS-S/HETG 0th-order flares on time scale of $20-70$ ks. We further conduct detailed simulations to characterize the detection incompleteness and bias, which is critical to a comprehensive follow-up statistical analysis of flare properties. These studies together will help to establish Sgr A$^{\star}$ as a unique laboratory to understand the astrophysics of prevailing low-luminosity black holes in the Universe.