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M. P. Muno, M. R. Morris (UCLA), F. K. Baganoff (MIT/CSR), G. C. Bower (UC Berkeley), S. Park (Penn State), T. Nagata, S. Nishiyama (Nagoya U.)
We will report on our ongoing project to identify the natures of X-ray sources with luminosities between 1031 and 1033 erg/s that were detected with Chandra toward the Galactic center. The majority of the point sources are hard (consistent with a Gamma<1 power law), and exhibit prominent line emission from both low-ionization and He-like iron. This suggests that the population of X-ray sources are dominated by magnetic cataclysmic variables, which are the most numerous hard X-ray sources with comparable luminosities in the Galaxy. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of sources that are probably other classes of source, such as massive binaries containing Wolf-Rayet and O stars, low- and high-mass X-ray binaries containing neutron stars and black holes, and possibly even young pulsars. These latter systems can be identified with observations at radio and infrared wavelengths, and knowledge of their relative numbers is important for constraining the star formation history and the evolution of binary systems near the Galactic center. I will report on the first counterparts that have been identified through observations with the VLA, the SIRIUS infrared array on the IRSF, HST/NICMOS, and NIRC2 on Keck.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mmuno@ucla.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #3
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.