ISWI Newsletter - Vol.2 No.66
24 August 2010

The following item (in blue) was received at the "ISWI Newsletter Office" on Fri, 6 Aug 2010 at 09:55:54 -0300, from Dr. Jean-Pierre Raulin in Brazil. I returned to this office only recently; I was in Africa from August 6 to 21.

Please consider the following text and attached paper for ISWI newsletter:

This is a report on a recent finding using the South America VLF NETwork (SAVNET) of Magnetar (SGR-J1550-5418) detection. Attached is the accepted paper for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letter.

Using the simple technique of monitoring subionospheric propagation anomalies, SAVNET recently observed many bursts from SGR-J1550-5418. Contrary to the 3 giant flare detections observed so far (since 30 years), the present observation is related to low-to-intermediate gamma-ray bursts. Therefore it offers new possibilities of detecting such relevant events, on a routine basis. Magnetars studies are of great astrophysical importance, and provide a unique opportunity to study exotic objects under extreme physical conditions: extreme densities ("nuclear fluid" and "wall-to-wall nucleus), B ~ 10¹⁵ G, releasing up to 10**44-45 erg in few 100s milliseconds.

The simple detection described in this paper provides an interesting mean for a complementary diagnostic of such objects from space sensors, the latter being in some occasions under saturation, off-pointing, and/or Earth occultation conditions.

This event was detected using VLF/SAVNET bases located in ISWI participating countries in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru.

Kind regards,
Jean-Pierre Raulin

Contributions to this newsletter are always warmly welcome.

Cordially yours, George Maeda Editor of ISWI Newsletter Hakozaki Campus, Kyushu University, Japan.

(1) Y. T. Tanaka, Jean-Pierre Raulin, Fernando C. P. Bertoni, P. R. Fagundes, J. Chau, N. J. Schuch, M. Hayakawa, Y. Hobara, T. Terasawa, and T. Takahashi "First VLF detection of short repeated bursts from magnetar SGR J1550-5418", 459 KB pdf, 14 pages, (click )

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