BatAnalysis -- A Comprehensive Python Pipeline for Swift BAT Survey Analysis
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Date
2023-03-11
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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
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Abstract
The Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is a coded aperture gamma-ray instrument with a large
field of view that primarily operates in survey mode when it is not triggering on transient events.
The survey data consists of eighty-channel detector plane histograms that accumulate photon
counts over time periods of at least 5 minutes. These histograms are processed on the ground and
are used to produce the survey dataset between 14 and 195 keV. Survey data comprises > 90%
of all BAT data by volume and allows for the tracking of long term light curves and spectral
properties of cataloged and uncataloged hard X-ray sources. Until now, the survey dataset has
not been used to its full potential due to the complexity associated with its analysis and the lack
of easily usable pipelines. Here, we introduce the BatAnalysis python package which provides a
modern, open-source pipeline to process and analyze BAT survey data. BatAnalysis allows members
of the community to use BAT survey data in more advanced analyses of astrophysical sources
including pulsars, pulsar wind nebula, active galactic nuclei, and other known/unknown transient
events that may be detected in the hard X-ray band. We outline the steps taken by the python
code and exemplify its usefulness and accuracy by analyzing survey data from the Crab Pulsar,
NGC 2992, and a previously uncataloged MAXI Transient. The BatAnalysis package allows for ∼
18 years of BAT survey to be used in a systematic way to study a large variety of astrophysical sources.