ANITA, A New InTegral Archive
INTEGRAL (International Gamma-ray Astrophysics Laboratory) is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). Successfully launched in 2002, it has been providing an amazing wealth of data ever since. It has detected and characterized in hard X-rays (>3 keV) more than 1000 sources, mostly Active Galactic Nuclei, X-Ray Binaries (high mass and low mass), cataclysmic variables and unidentified sources.
In order to have a long-term and self-consistent view of the high energy sky observed by INTEGRAL, we have built ANITA, an archive of all the public data currently available. For each INTEGRAL pointing (~2ks) we extract images and detected source lists in four energy bands within 18-150 keV for the imager IBIS and in one band, 3-20 keV, for the two X-ray monitors (JEM-X1,2).
The image above (left) shows a ~15 year light-curve of the black hole high mass X-ray binary Cyg X-1 in all those bands, together with a single pointing image (on-source zoom, 22-50 keV). For the sources detected in the IBIS images, we also extract light-curves with a finer binning of 100s (a total of a ~1 day light-curve is shown in the upper right plot).
A more detailed description of ANITA can be found here.
This approach has proven very successful and enables long-term systematic studies on classes of sources (be they Galactic or extra-Galactic) that are analyzed in a self-consistent way, free from different instrument biases. Examples are our study of Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients and of sixty High Mass X-ray binaries. See this page for an overview of our work on binaries.
Feel free to contact us to find out what your favorite sources are up to!
