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R. Griffiths, A. Ptak (Carnegie Mellon University), E. Feigelson, N. Brandt (Pennsylvania State University), J. Bregman (University of Michigan), L. Townsley, G. Garmire, R. Sambruna (Pennsylvania State University)
We present striking new observations of M82 taken with the frontside-illuminated Imager array of the ACIS instrument on the Chandra X-ray Observatory. In a 34 ks total exposure, about twenty compact sources are detected within the central 2-arcmin region, together with diffuse emission which comprises 40% of the emission above 2 keV. This diffuse emission shows interesting structure including knotty structures and arcs and is investigated here in detail. In the 5-8 keV band the diffuse emission is localized to the central 30'' x 20'' region and we investigate the possibility of inverse-Compton emission.
We do not detect any convincing evidence for a strong, hard source which might be a putative AGN. The ACIS point source possibly associated with the radio AGN candidate of Wills et al. has an observed luminosity of ~ 1 x 1038 ergs s-1 (2-10 keV). The brightest point source appears to be variable within the Chandra observation and is consistent with a source previously detected in the Einstein Observatory and ROSAT RHI images, presumably associated with a black-hole binary. The other point sources in the central region do not correlate well with radio SNR, except for one or two cases. The most likely interpretation of these sources is that they are x-ray binaries.
The authors acknowledge NASA grant number NAS 8-38252 for funding this research.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: ptak@astro.phys.cmu.edu