A NEW CLASS OF HIGHLY ABSORBED PERSISTENT HMXB

To date more than 40 new bright hard Xray Galactic plane sources have beendiscovered with INTEGRAL, and 10 of them have followup observations withXMMNewton or Chandra. In most cases, the Xray data exhibit slow pulsations,and the absorbing column density appear much larger than expected in the Galaxyor in front of the companion star. Many of those sources are persistent and seemto belong to a new class of HMXB, with a slow pulsar orbiting in a densecircumstellar material or within the companion stellar envelope itself. The goalof this proposal is twofold. We propose (1) to observe several additionalpersistent new INTEGRAL sources and (2) to study more in depth a few alreadystudied sources. truncated!, Please see actual data for full text [truncated!, Please see actual data for full text]