A CATALOG OF X-RAY POINT SOURCES FROM TWO MEGASECONDS OF CHANDRA OBSERVATIONS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER

By M. Muno, F. Bauer, F. Baganoff, R. Bandyopadhyay, G. Bower, W. N. Brandt, Patrick S. Broos, A. Cotera, S. Eikenberry, G. Garmire and 16 more. 2008

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We present a catalog of 9017 X-ray sources identified in Chandra observations of a 2°× 0.°8 field around the Galactic center. This enlarges the number of known X-ray sources in the region by a factor of 2.5. The catalog incorporates all of the ACIS-I observations as of 2007 August, which total 2.25 Ms of exposure. At the distance to the Galactic center (8 kpc), we are sensitive to sources with luminosities of 4 × 1032 erg s−1 (0.5–8.0 keV; 90% confidence) over an area of 1 deg2, and up to an order of magnitude more sensitive in the deepest exposure (1.0 Ms) around Sgr A*. The positions of 60% of our sources are accurate to <1 ″ (95% confidence), and 20% have positions accurate to <0.″5. We search for variable sources, and find that 3% exhibit flux variations within an observation, and 10% exhibit variations from observation-to-observation. We also find one source, CXOUGC J174622.7 − 285218, with a periodic 1745 s signal (1.4% chance probability), which is probably a magnetically accreting cataclysmic variable. We compare the spatial distribution of X-ray sources to a model for the stellar distribution, and find 2.8σ evidence for excesses in the numbers of X-ray sources in the region of recent star formation encompassed by the Arches, Quintuplet, and Galactic center star clusters. These excess sources are also seen in the luminosity distribution of the X-ray sources, which is flatter near the Arches and Quintuplet than elsewhere in the field. These excess point sources, along with a similar longitudinal asymmetry in the distribution of diffuse iron emission that has been reported by other authors, probably have their origin in the young stars that are prominent at l ≈ 0.°1.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e78cb4d9e5eac69fa21e564c2943b9fa0de05d0

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Citations in the corpus

NuSTAR DISCOVERY OF A 3.76 s TRANSIENT MAGNETAR NEAR SAGITTARIUS A* (2013, background): “This sets an upper limit on the quiescent 2–10 keV luminosity of 1032 erg s−1 (Muno et al. 2009) while the bursting 2–10 keV luminosity of SGR J1745−29 reached ∼3 × 1035 erg s−1.”
THE NUCLEAR SPECTROSCOPIC TELESCOPE ARRAY (NuSTAR) HIGH-ENERGY X-RAY MISSION (2013, background): “Chandra has previously uncovered in excess of 6,000 sources in a 2 × 0.8 degree region (Muno et al. 2009).”
INNOVATIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF CHANDRA-ACIS OBSERVATIONS (2010, background): “Point sources (Muno et al. 2003, 2006, 2009).”
X-Ray Emissions from Accreting White Dwarfs: A Review (2017, background): “Another example is the survey of the Galactic center region: Muno et al. (2009) cataloged 9017 X-ray sources in the Chandra observations of a 2◦× 0.8◦ field, of which 6760 have high absorption consistent with sources lying at or beyond the Galactic center distance, and argued that a large fraction…”