ABSTRACT. We report High Energy Transient Explorer 2 (HETE-2) Wide Field X-Ray Monitor/French Gamma Telescope observations of the X-ray flash XRF 020903. This event was extremely soft: the ratio log(S_X/S_γ) = 0.7, where S_X and S_γ are the fluences in the 2-30 and 30-400 keV energy bands, is the most extreme value observed so far by HETE-2. In addition, the spectrum has an observed peak energy of E < 5.0 keV (99.7% probability upper limit), and no photons were detected above ~10 keV. The burst is shorter at higher energies, which is similar to the behavior of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We consider the possibility that the burst lies at very high redshift and that the low value of E is due to the cosmological redshift, and show that this is very unlikely. We find that the properties of XRF 020903 are consistent with the relation between the fluences S(7-30 keV) and S(30-400 keV), found by Barraud et al. for GRBs and X-ray-rich GRBs, and are consistent with the extension by a decade of the hardness-intensity correlation found by the same authors. Assuming that XRF 020903 lies at a redshift z = 0.25, as implied by the host galaxy of the candidate optical and radio afterglows of this burst, we find that the properties of XRF 020903 are consistent with an extension by a factor ~300 of the relation between the isotropic-equivalent energy E_iso and the peak E_peak of the νF_ν spectrum (in the source frame of the burst) found by Amati et al. for GRBs. The results presented in this paper therefore provide evidence that X-ray flashes (XRFs), X-ray-rich GRBs, and GRBs form a continuum and are a single phenomenon. The results also impose strong constraints on models of XRFs and X-ray-rich GRBs.

Subject headings: gamma rays: bursts; X-rays: bursts; X-rays: individual (GRB 020903)

Print publication: Issue 2 (2004 February 20)
Received 2003 April 24, accepted for publication 2003 November 7