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Transient Alerts » in reply to EP261015a — X-ray Transient, Optical Transient

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In plain words Notable

On 15 October 2026 the Einstein Probe, a space telescope that watches for X-ray flashes, saw a brief flare lasting about two minutes in the southern sky. Telescopes then found a faint, slowly changing point of visible light in the same area, sitting on top of a faint galaxy. It faded a little in the first day and a half, then brightened again around day 4 and stayed roughly steady through day 5. A separate, fainter X-ray source in the same region was found to belong to an unrelated, known quasar (a distant galaxy with a very bright core). The leading idea is that the visible light is a supernova (an exploding star) linked to the X-ray flash, but this is not confirmed, and no distance has been measured yet.

How unusual is it? A visible-light counterpart was found for an X-ray flash, and its rebrightening hints at an accompanying supernova, which is not typical of most such flashes. It is not exceptional because the link is unconfirmed, the source could be an unrelated transient, and no distance is known; a spectrum confirming a supernova or giving a distance would settle the verdict.

Written by an AI model (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the official reports in this thread, and rewritten as new reports arrived (version 4); last updated . It may contain mistakes: the reports themselves are the authority.

EP261015a: Einstein Probe detection of a fast X-ray transient
GCN Circulars —

GCN Circular 45956
EP261015a: Einstein Probe detection of a fast X-ray transient
From: EP Team at NAOC/CAS
Issued: 2026-10-16 06:21 UTC
Type: X-ray Transient

R.-Z. Li (YNAO), G. -L. Huang, Z.-X. Li (IHEP), M. Nie (YNAO) and H. Sun (NAOC) on behalf of the Einstein Probe (EP) team:

We report on the detection of a fast X-ray transient by the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) on board the Einstein Probe (EP) mission, designated EP261015a. The transient did not trigger EP-WXT onboard. We sent a GCN Notice manually with trigger ID: 11900947714. The WXT light curve of the transient began at 2026-10-15T13:15:36 UTC, exhibited two peaks, and lasted for 130 s. The WXT position of the source is R.A. = 44.341 deg, DEC = -13.365 deg (J2000) with an uncertainty of 3 arcmin in radius (90% C.L. statistical and systematic).

The 0.5-4 keV WXT spectrum can be fitted by an absorbed powerlaw model with a fixed Galactic column density of 3.5 x 10^20 cm^-2 and a photon index of 1.45 (-0.71,+0.88). The derived 0.5-4 keV unabsorbed flux is 6.25 (-2.91/+3.90) x 10^-10 erg/cm^2/s.

A follow-up observation with the Follow-up X-ray Telescope (FXT) has been scheduled. Further information will be updated when the telemetry data is received.

A possible optical counterpart to the transient was reported by NOT and LCO (Corcoran et al., GCN 45955).

Launched on January 9, 2024, EP is a space X-ray observatory to monitor the soft X-ray sky with X-ray follow-up capability (Yuan et al. 2022, Handbook of X-ray and Gamma-ray Astrophysics).

Filter: only the top 10% of the past year's X-ray transients are posted, ranked by the number of GCN Circulars written about them (now ≥ 11). Thresholds are recalculated monthly. Only events first reported within the past 7 days can start a thread.
Relayed automatically from NASA's General Coordinates Network.

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