The soft x-ray counterpart of the newly discovered INTEGRAL source IGR J16195-4945

The INTEGRAL satellite, during its regular scanning observations of the Galactic plane, has discovered several new X-ray sources emitting above 20 keV. The nature of the great majority of them is still unknown. Here we report on the likely low energy counterpart, observed with ASCA in 1994 and 1997, of one of these sources, IGR J16195-4945. The ASCA source is faint (F2-10 keV similar to 10(-11) erg cm(-2) s(-1)), highly absorbed (N-H similar to 10(23) cm(-2)) and has a rather hard spectrum (photon index similar to 0.6). These spectral properties are suggestive of a neutron star in a High Mass X-ray Binary. Our analysis of all the public INTEGRAL data of IGR J16195-4945 shows that this source is variable and was in a high state with a 20-40 keV flux of similar to17 mCrab in two occasions in March 2003.