The aim of this project is to provide a tool to spot variable sources in EPIC-pn XMM-Newton observations. This is done by computing the variability of each pixel of the detector instead of generating lightcurves of individual sources. It allows to find faint transients for which the lightcurves are not generated by XMM-Newton's pipeline since they are too faint.
We encourage the potential users to read the users guide (EXOD_users_guide.pdf), and especially follow the tutorial presented in section 6.
If you use EXOD for your research, please acknowledge it by citing Pastor-Marazuela, Webb and Wojtowicz (in prep).
Original project "Variabilitectron" created by Damien Wojtowicz. See previous versions: https://framagit.org/DWojtowicz/Variabilitectron https://framagit.org/InesPM/Variabilitectron
Let's set the path to where the scripts are located and where we want to store our data, for instance bash $SCRIPTS/exod_analysis.sh -o $obs -f $FOLDER -s $SCRIPTS
SCRIPTS=/path/EXOD/scripts
FOLDER=/path/data
One can use the exod_analysis.sh script to download, filter and compute the variability with four sets of parameters. Let's try, for instance, with observation 0652250701:
obs=0124710801
bash $SCRIPTS/exod_analysis.sh -o $obs -d $FOLDER -s $SCRIPTS
The whole process should take a few minutes, and it depends on the duration of the observation.
An example of the output of these commands can be found in the folder examples.
As the render_all.py output shows, one variable source has been detected with TW=100 s, DL=8, bs=3.
