Pith Number

pith:TM6P66N6

pith:2026:TM6P66N6UWOB5P37453NFX3B7U

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Significant or Not? The Impact of Randomisation During Data Reduction on Confirming a New Pulsating Ultraluminous X-ray Source Candidate in Centaurus A

Alistair T. Pagan, Amy H. Knight, Callum Potter, Dominic J. Walton, Timothy P. Roberts

Randomisation during XMM-Newton data reduction introduces considerable uncertainty in confirming marginal pulsations from a new ultraluminous X-ray source candidate in Centaurus A.

arxiv:2605.15137 v1 · 2026-05-14 · astro-ph.HE

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

the intrinsic randomisation employed by XMM-Newton's Science Analysis Software, XMM-SAS, during the data reduction procedure introduces considerable uncertainty in the strength of our marginal pulsations, which varies significantly between consecutive data reduction iterations.

C2weakest assumption

That the observed variation in pulsation significance across repeated reductions is caused solely by the documented randomisation step in XMM-SAS rather than by other unexamined aspects of the data or analysis pipeline.

C3one line summary

A soft-spectrum PULX candidate is reported in Cen A but XMM-SAS randomisation during data reduction renders the marginal 1.27 Hz pulsation detection unreliable across repeated reductions.

References

99 extracted · 99 resolved · 46 Pith anchors

[1] Bachetti M., 2018, HENDRICS: High ENergy Data Reduction Interface from the Command Shell , Astrophysics Source Code Library, record ascl:1805.019 2018

[24] G., Egret D., eds, Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series Vol 2004

[63] Shakura N. I., Sunyaev R. A., 1973, , https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1973A&A....24..337S 24, 337 1973

[80] XMM-Newton-SOC 2025, Users Guide to the XMM-Newton Science Analysis System, Issue 19.0. ESA, https://xmm-tools.cosmos.esa.int/external/xmm_user_support/documentation/sas_usg/USG/ 2025

[83] The Nature of Accreting Black Holes in Nearby Galaxy Nuclei · doi:10.1086/307356

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-17T21:40:25.591960Z
Last reissued	2026-05-17T21:57:18.905397Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	unsigned_v0
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

9b3cff79bea59c1ebf7fe776d2df61fd13c574a930077efadc8f8e9953e78556

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.15137 · arxiv_version: 2605.15137v1 · pith_short_12: TM6P66N6UWOB · pith_short_16: TM6P66N6UWOB5P37 · pith_short_8: TM6P66N6

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/TM6P66N6UWOB5P37453NFX3B7U \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 9b3cff79bea59c1ebf7fe776d2df61fd13c574a930077efadc8f8e9953e78556

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "ceb07cbc46e8ffe52e5b2a3d2102e9baca249e4ac33485525d1f29d1716c1233",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.HE",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-14T17:43:03Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "587ab18759e3984f75e8c43ccda26b93176600f32df65cdfaaf53f2c7f476559"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.15137",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}