A refined position catalog of the Swift XRT afterglows

Abstract

We present a catalogue of refined positions of 68 gamma ray burst (GRB) afterglows observed by the Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT) from the launch up to 2005 Oct 16. This is a result of the refinement of the XRT boresight calibration. We tested this correction by means of a systematic study of a large sample of X-ray sources observed by XRT with well established optical counterparts. We found that we can reduce the systematic error radius of the measurements by a factor of two, from 6.5" to 3.2" (90% of confidence). We corrected all the positions of the afterglows observed by XRT in the first 11 months of the Swift mission. This is particularly important for the 37 X-ray afterglows without optical counterpart. Optical follow-up of dark GRBs, in fact, will be more efficient with the use of the more accurate XRT positions.

arXiv comment4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table ; accepted for publication in A&A Letters. The revised version contains updated positions

References in corpus (5)

• The Swift X-ray Telescope
• The Swift Ultra-Violet/Optical Telescope
• The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) on the Swift MIDEX Mission
• GRB 050904 at redshift 6.3: observations of the oldest cosmic explosion after the Big Bang
• An improvement of the BeppoSAX LECS and MECS positioning accuracy

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• The seven year Swift-XRT point source catalog (1SWXRT)
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• Swift observations of GRB050904: the most distant cosmic explosion ever observed
• The Swift X-ray flaring afterglow of GRB 050607
• Swift XRT Observations of the Afterglow of XRF 050416A
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• Swift multi-wavelength observations of the bright flaring burst GRB051117A
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