An Optically Discovered Outburst from XTE J1859+226

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48 inch and the 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants No. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum, Northwestern University and former partners the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratories, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1106171.

The ZTF forced photometry service was funded under the Heising–Simons Foundation grant #12540303 (PI: Graham).

This work made use of data supplied by the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester.

We acknowledge with thanks the variable star observations from the AAVSO International Database contributed by observers worldwide and used in this research.

This research has made use of a collection of ISIS functions (ISISscripts) provided by ECAP/Remeis observatory and MIT (http://www.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/isis/).

This research has made use of the MAXI data provided by RIKEN, JAXA and the MAXI team.

E.C.B., R.P., and Y.K. gratefully acknowledge support from the NSF AAG grant 1812779 and grant #2018-0908 from the Heising–Simons Foundation.

E.C.B. acknowledges further support from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through Cooperative Agreement 1258333 managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), and the Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Additional LSST funding comes from private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support from LSSTC Institutional Members. M.W.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with grant Nos. PHY-2010970 and OAC-2117997.

Facilities

PO:1.2m (Zwicky Transient Facility) - , PO:1.5m (SEDM) - Palomar Observatory's 1.5 meter Telescope, Keck:I (LRIS) - KECK I Telescope, Swift - Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, AAVSO - American Association of Variable Star Observers International Database.

Software References

FPipe (Fremling et al. 2016), pysedm (Rigault et al. 2019), LPipe (Perley 2019), PySpecKit (Ginsburg & Mirocha 2011; Ginsburg et al. 2022), ISIS (Houck & Denicola 2000), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; The Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), numpy (Van Der Walt et al. 2011; Harris et al. 2020), seaborn (Waskom et al. 2018), pandas (McKinney 2010), jupyter (Kluyver et al. 2016), ipython (Pérez & Granger 2007).