Soft X-ray focusing Telescope aboard AstroSat: early results

The Soft X-ray focusing Telescope (SXT) is a moderate resolution X-ray imaging spectrometer supplementing the ultraviolet and hard X-ray payloads for broadband studies of cosmic sources with AstroSat. Well suited for observing bright X-ray sources, SXT observations of nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN), binary star systems with compact companions, active stars, etc. are producing long soft X-ray light curves and high-quality spectra. The strong X-ray variability and multiple spectral components exhibited by SXT observations of nearby Seyfert 1 galaxies show excellent promise to probe accretion disks and central engines in AGN through multi-band variability and spectroscopy.