Black Hole Transient: Heads up to prepare for RFO coming soon

Fri, 02/11/2022 - 17:18

Hi, folks,

The black hole candidate  MAXI J1910-057/Swift J1910.2-0546 is in a new X-ray outburst.  The previous outburst lasted about 6 months.  The source name gives the rough coordinates, and it's presently up during daytime, but as it starts to be observable, we'd like to get people to take high cadence photometry.  It got up to about 16th magnitude last time, so reachable for a lot of reasonably well-equipped observers.  It is very faint in quiescence, so no one has gotten an orbital period yet, but most black holes are superhumpers when people look carefully enough, so we should be able to get a good estimate in outburst if we get enough data.  The best guess we have is that the period is 7-8 hours, so we'd need a lot of data from all over the world.  Fortunately, it's close to the equator, so people in both the north and south will be able to observe when it comes out from behind the Sun.