Publication Date

2006

Journal or Book Title

The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series

Abstract

We present the catalog of X-ray sources detected in a shallow Chandra survey of the inner 2° × 08 of the Galaxy and in two deeper observations of the Radio Arches and Sgr B2. The catalog contains 1352 objects that are highly absorbed (NH 4 × 1022 cm-2) and are therefore likely to lie near the Galactic center (D 8 kpc), and 549 less absorbed sources that lie within 6 kpc of Earth. On the basis of the inferred luminosities of the X-ray sources and the expected numbers of various classes of objects, we suggest that the sources with LX 1033 ergs s-1 that comprise 90% of the catalog are cataclysmic variables and that the 100 brighter objects are accreting neutron stars and black holes, young isolated pulsars, and Wolf-Rayet and O (WR/O) stars in colliding-wind binaries. We find that the spatial distribution of X-ray sources matches that of the old stellar population observed in the infrared, which supports our suggestion that most of the X-ray sources are old cataclysmic variables. However, we find that there is an apparent excess of 10 bright sources in the Radio Arches region. That region is already known to be the site of recent star formation, so we suggest that the bright sources in this region are young high-mass X-ray binaries, pulsars, or WR/O star binaries. We briefly discuss some astrophysical questions that this catalog can be used to address.

Comments

This is the pre-published version harvested from ArXiv. The published version is located at http://iopscience.iop.org/0067-0049/165/1/173/

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1086/504798

Pages

173-

Volume

165

Issue

1

Download

Share

COinS