2002A&A...384..163C

We report on the results of a series of X-ray observations of the transient black hole candidate XTE J2012+381 during the 1998 outburst performed with the BeppoSAX satellite. The observed broad-band energy spectrum can be described by the superposition of an absorbed disk black body, with an iron line plus a high energy component, modelled with either a power law or a Comptonisation tail. The source showed pronounced spectral variability between our five observations. While the soft component in the spectrum remained almost unchanged throughout our campaign, we detected a hard spectral tail which extended to 200keV in the first two observations, but became barely detectable up to 50keV in the following two. A further re-hardening is observed in the final observation. The transition from a hard to a soft and then back to a hard state occurred around an unabsorbed 0.1-200keV luminosity of 10³⁸erg/s (at 10kpc). This indicates that state transitions in XTE 2012+281 are probably not driven only by mass accretion rate, but additional physical parameters must play a role in the evolution of the outburst.