Optical observations of Scorpius X-1 in 2008: Evidence of rapid variability

Optical observations of Sco X-1 with exposure times around 0.5 s were performed with the 1.56 m telescope of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in 2008. With these observations, we studied the fluctuation of the optical flux on three short timescales (5, 10, 100 s). We found that the standard deviations of fluctuations on these three timescales differ from those of Gaussian distributions by 7 Sigma, 5 Sigma and 3 Sigma, respectively. The result suggests that the variations in the intensity on these short timescales differ from pure statistical fluctuations, which, we suggest, is due to the intrinsic variability in the optical emission.