Swift/BAT "x-ray flare" is an unfortunately timed detector glitch
ATel #14076; Aaron Tohuvavohu (University of Toronto)
on 8 Oct 2020; 23:33 UT
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Credential Certification: Aaron Tohuvavohu (a.tohuvavohu@mail.utoronto.ca)
Subjects: Radio, X-ray, Soft Gamma-ray Repeater, Magnetar
Following ATEL #14075 which reported an apparent X-ray flare in the promptly available Swift/BAT low-energy (15-25 keV) summed-array rates light curves, 3.11 seconds of BAT time-tagged event data have become available for analysis.
These 3.11 seconds of data include the time of the putative X-ray flare. This event data file was produced and saved by BAT due to on-board detection of this high SNR rate spike in the real-time analyses (a so-called 'failed trigger'), with trigger ID #999248. We cleaned the event data of hot/noisy detectors to create a sky image at the peak time from the light curve, using the normal BAT imaging analysis recipe. No significant source is found anywhere in this sky image. There is no detection at the location of SGR 1935+2154.
The distribution of the individual counts on the BAT detector plane are suggestive instead of a non-astrophysical origin from a glitch in the detector.
