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P. J. Green (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), ChaMP Collaboration
The cosmic X-ray background radiation, formerly called `diffuse', has been almost completely resolved into point sources by Chandra and XMM, The nature and evolution of those sources are key to our understanding of the relationship between the formation of stars, galactic halos, and supermassive black holes. This requires multiwavelength followup of Chandra sources over a large area.
The Chandra Multiwavelength Project (ChaMP) is a serendipitous survey of the X-ray sky, covers about 14 sq.deg. of sky in the X-ray flux range of -13 to -16 (log 2-10 keV flux, cgs) and will include about 8000 sources, with optical IDs for 75%. To 21st mag in the optical, about 70% of these are newly discovered active galactic nuclei (AGN). Using Chandra archival data, we span X-ray flux limits between those reached by previous satellites and those of the deepest small-area Chandra and XMM surveys, allowing study of larger samples of rare objects such as absorbed AGN, groups, clusters of galaxies, and BLLacs.
Optical imaging and spectroscopy of the ChaMP fields are underway at a variety of telescopes using Sloan g', r', i' filters to a flux limit matched to the X-ray such that at least 3/4 of the X-ray sources will be optically identified. We present early results from our analyses, highlight some of the unique sources we are uncovering, and offer an introduction to ChaMP available on the web.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of NASA grant: AR1-2003X (Chandra).
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: pgreen@cfa.harvard.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.