[Previous] | [Session 15] | [Next]
K.N. Borozdin, W.C. Priedhorsky, S.P. Trudolyubov (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
M31 is the closest spiral galaxy, and belongs to the same morphological type as the Milky Way. X-ray observations reveal multiple point sources in the bulge, plus a significant unresolved diffuse emission. Recently, our spatially-resolved analysis of ROSAT/PSPC data revealed the difference between the spectra of the point sources, presumably low-mass X-ray binaries, and the unresolved emission (Borozdin & Priedhorsky, 2000). For the first time, we extracted the spectrum of the unresolved emission, and found it to be significantly softer than the integral spectrum of the bulge. This result may also be applicable to other early-type X-ray faint galaxies, which have similar spectra. As data become available from XMM-Newton and Chandra, we will analyze them in the context of this analysis.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: kbor@lanl.gov