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The Galactic Bulge is a region rich in bright variable high-energy X-ray and gamma-ray sources. Since INTEGRAL (Winkler et al. 2003) AO-3, we observe this region regularly during all the visibility periods (see Kuulkers et al. 2007). Complete hexagonal dither patterns (7 pointings of 1800 sec each) are performed during each INTEGRAL revolution (i.e. every 3 days). As a service to the scientific community, the IBIS/ISGRI (Lebrun et al. 2003, Ubertini et al. 2003) and JEM-X (Lund et al. 2003) light curves and sky images in two energy bands are made publicly available as soon as the observations are performed. Since AO7 the raw data are made public immediately; the near-real-time data can be downloaded from the ISDC, shortly following the end of a monitoring observation. Once processed by the ISDC the consolidated data can also be downloaded from the public available area.
RATIONALE
Above: IBIS/ISGRI (18-40 keV) mosaic significance image summarising 5 years of INTEGRAL Galactic bulge monitoring observations. Superimposed are the fully-coded FOV of IBIS (white square), as well as the fully-illuminated and zero-response FOV's of JEM-X (small and large circle, respectively), centered on the GC. The sources are annotated (persistent: white, transient: red), except those in the crowded GC.
The results from the first 1.5 yrs have been published in A&A (also available from astro-ph/0701244). They were also the subject of the 2007 January INTEGRAL picture of the month and an ESA Press Release. A movie (sometimes referred to as `PopCorn') is available on YouTube. An updated version of `PopCorn' can be retrieved from ESA's Science and Technology page, "A cosmic light-show: the Galactic Bulge as viewed by INTEGRAL".
On October 17, 2012, INTEGRAL has been 10 years in space. A new movie of `PopCorn', which contains also a 3D view of our Galaxy with INTEGRAL detected sources, featured on ESA News ("Integral: a decade revealing the high-energy sky") and on the ESA SciTech pages ("INTEGRAL celebrates a decade of discoveries"), as part of the celebration.
One can download the new `PopCorn' and 3D Galaxy movies from our Movies page.
The scripts for analysing the data and producing the light curve and image web pages were originally developed by Simon Shaw; they are currently maintained by Erik Kuulkers at ESA/ESAC.
We request that when results from these analyses are used, they be referenced as "from Kuulkers et al. 2007 using the OSA9 software, distributed by the ISDC (Courvoisier et al. 2003)".
References
Courvoisier T. J.-L., et al., 2003, A&A, 411, L53
Kuulkers E., et al., 2007, A&A, 466, 595 (print here)
Lebrun F., et al., 2003, A&A, 411, L141
Lund N., et al., 2003, A&A, 411, L231
Ubertini P., et al., 2003, A&A, 411, L131
Winkler C., et al., 2003, A&A, 411, L1The results are displayed in counts per second for each pointing (1 data point is the average flux in single pointings of approximately 1.8 ksec each). Click on the source names on the left hand side to access lightcurves data and images. Here are the energy ranges used and approximate comparisons with the Crab:
THE RESULTS
ISGRI
18-40 keV (1 Crab ~ 210 counts/s)
40-100 keV (1 Crab ~ 104 counts/s)JEM-X
3-10 keV (1 Crab on axis ~ 235 [J1], 249 [J2] counts/s)
10-25 keV (1 Crab on axis ~ 74 [J1], 70 [J2] counts/s)
The above numbers are taken from the publicly available Crab calibration observations. The organisation of the ASCII lightcurves is given on each respective light curve page.
WARNING: Please note that the latest results are "quick-look" results automatically extracted from the Near-Real-Time (NRT) data. As such they are affected by the known issues of the software package used to extract them (currently: OSA 9.0).Click here to get more information about the results and data analysis.
For questions, please contact "isdc-gb-group (at) unige.ch"
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