Abstract
Variability pervades the cosmos at all time scales: astronomers observe and try to understand this ever-changing sky. In particular, X-ray astronomy studies extreme environments, where many kinds of sources display a variety of temporal behaviors. Often, this information goes largely unexplored but is available to the scientific community through public access archives. XMM-Newton, with its combination of a high performance and more than 15 years of public data, is a goldmine for exploring the variable X-ray sky. EXTraS is a EU-funded project that aims to characterize as carefully as possible the variability of almost all XMM sources. I will present the various aspects of X-ray variability that we are exploring in this project. I will also present some innovative techniques we developed for dealing with a variable background and with low-counts statistics. I will overview some of the early results coming from this analysis, like flares from a young stellar object and the first pulsar detected in the Andromeda Galaxy. Finally, the products of EXTraS, a catalog and a set of analysis tools, will soon be released to the community enabling you to produce your own science from X-ray variability.
Coffee and tea will be served 20 minutes prior to the seminar.
Anyone interested is welcome to attend.