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D.K. Strickland (JHU)
I will discuss a luminous X-ray source detected in our 52ks Chandra ACIS-S observation of the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 3628 which may be another intermediate-mass black hole candidate. This source is at least ~19\arcsec \equiv 1 kpc from the nucleus of NGC 3628, has no optical, IR or radio counterpart we can detect, has a peak 0.3-8.0 keV X-ray luminosity of L\rm X ~5 \times 1040 erg s-1, and is extremely variable (having changed in luminosity by a factor > 27 over a 3 year period based on existing ROSAT observations). This source is clearly another example of an intermediate luminosity X-ray object (IXO), very similar to the most-luminous X-ray source in M82 that has attracted so much attention.
Of particular interest is that Chandra's superb spatial resolution allows us to extract an X-ray spectrum that is unambigously of this source alone. The ACIS-S spectrum of the NGC 3628 IXO is best fit by a \Gamma = 1.8±0.2} power law model, in contrast with most ASCA-based studies of IXOs which find multi-color disk models provide better fits to their X-ray spectra. I will briefly discuss possible reasons for this conflict.
Dave Strickland is supported by NASA through Chandra Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Number PF0-10012.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dks@pha.jhu.edu