SGR ACTIVITY AND GLOBAL CHARACTERISTICS

Of the over one thousand detected cosmic transient gamma-ray sources, only three are known to have exhibited recurrent activity. Apart from their recurrent nature, these events differ from the majority of bursts in that they are of much shorter duration and have relatively soft spectra. They can thus be considered as a distinct class of objects - the Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs). Their embryonic sky distribution suggests that they are galactic objects. The absence of detection of new sources in the 4.0 years of BATSE operation, together with the BATSE detection of the reactivation of two of the three already known SGRs, indicates that these objects are rare. We present here a short review of the overall SGR activity and their global characteristics.