TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 8265 SUBJECT: SGR 0501+4516: preliminary results of the Suzaku ToO observation DATE: 08/09/18 04:41:04 GMT FROM: Kazutaka Yamaoka at Aoyama Gakuin U Y.E. Nakagawa (RIKEN), K. Yamaoka, A. Yoshida (AGU), T. Enoto, K. Nakazawa (U. Tokyo), K. Makishima (U. Tokyo/RIKEN), N. Rea (U. Amsterdam), P. Esposito (INAF/IASF), T. Sakamoto (GSFC/UMBC), and K. Hurley (U.C. Berkeley), on behalf of the Suzaku SGR ToO team, report: We report on a Suzaku ToO observation of the new soft gamma-ray repeater SGR 0501+4516 (Holland et al. GCN #8112, Barthelmy et al. GCN #8113), started on 2008-08-26 00:05 UT, for an exposure time of about 43 ksec (Mitsuda et al. GCN #8136). A bright point source was clearly detected in the XIS CCDs at a position consistent with that of SGR 0501+4516 (Evans et al. GCN #8148). From a preliminary analysis of the XIS data, the 1-10 keV persistent emission spectrum is well fit by a black body with a temperature of 0.7 keV, plus a power-law with a photon index of 2.9, absorbed by a hydrogen column density of 1.0x10^22 cm^-2. The absorbed 1-10 keV flux was (3.7+/-0.1)x10^-11 erg/cm^2/s. The XIS data confirm the source pulsations at a period of P = 5.762 +/- 0.001 s, consistent with the periodicity derived by the RXTE/PCA (Gogus et al. GCN #8118), Swift/XRT (Mangano et al. GCN #8146), and XMM-Newton (Rea et al. Atel #1688; Israel et al. Atel #1692) At least 16 short bursts were detected during the observation. The largest burst was observed on 2008-08-26 03:16:16 by all Suzaku's instruments including Suzaku-WAM, up to an energy of ~200 keV. The HXD spectral analysis of the persistent and burst emission is in progress. We would like to thank the Suzaku managers and the operation team for approving and carrying out the ToO observation.