| PROPOSAL OVERVIEW | |
| Proposal Title | The First Five Days: The Onset of Nuclear Burning in SAX J1808.4-3568 |
| Proposal Category | Isolated and Binary Compact Objects & their Evolution |
| Proposal Type | LARGE PROGRAM |
| Proposal Id | 096158 |
| Number of Observations | 3 |
| Total exposure time (ks) | 342 |
| PI DETAILS | |
| PI | Dr. T. Strohmayer |
| Institute | GSFC - Goddard Space Flight Center |
| Country | UNITED STATES |
| CO-INVESTIGATORS | ||
| Name | Country | |
| S. Casten | UNITED STATES | |
| D. Russel | UNITED STATES | |
| E. Brown | UNITED STATES | |
| ABSTRACT | |
| We propose an optically triggered, nearly continuous monitoring campaign of the first five days of an outburst of the accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar SAX J1808.4-3568 with XMM-Newton. Key goals for this unique campaign are to observe the accretion onset and the low accretion rate nuclear burning regime where weak, hydrogen triggered X-ray bursts are expected. Observational evidence for this regime has only recently been presented, but X-ray coverage of the onset of outbursts remains exceedingly rare, and even when observed have been done so with very low duty cycle. XMM-Newton provides the critical, nearly continuous observations needed to measure burst recurrence times and to fully account for the energy associated with accretion, and both stable and unstable CNO hydrogen burning. | |
| PAPERS |
| - CLASS 1: | papers that present specific XMM-Newton observations |
| - CLASS 2: | papers that refer to published XMM-Newton results with complementary observations, follow-up analysis, or theoretical analysis |
| - CLASS 3: | further deliveries which resulted from the program and which are made available to the community (e.g. source catalogues, processed images or spectra in public data base) |
| - CLASS 4: | comments and suggestions from PI |