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S. Laycock, J. Grindlay, J. Hong, X. Koenig, E. Schlegel, M. van den Berg, P. Zhao (CfA), E. Persson (Carnegie Obs.)
We have observed the galactic center with the PANIC infrared imager at Magellan. In 3 nights of optimal seeing (many hours of approx. 0.3 arcsec) we obtained a 10x10 arcmin mosaic centered on SgrA*, in J,H,K and Bracket gamma. This represents the deepest IR survey surrounding SgrA* which covers the majority of the deep Chandra field obtained by Muno et al and also being studied as part of our ongoing ChaMPlane survey. The discovery of several thousand hard X-ray point sources in the GC by Muno et al a key Chandra result and this work is directed at identifying these sources, by cutting through the obscuring dust clouds and attaining the highest possible spatial resolution over the Chandra field. We will present the multicolor mosaic and preliminary analysis, concentrating on positional matches for Chandra sources. The survey is designed to find sources with colors suggestive of Be-HMXBs, CVs and other X-ray binaries. The narrow band Br-gamma data is unique in its depth and resolution and will enable discrimination of accretion sources in even the most crowded regions.
This IR mosaic extends our optical work on low extinction windows in the galactic bulge (see papers by Grindlay et al and van den Berg et al), and our optical survey of the galactic bulge for ChaMPlane (see paper by Zhao et al).
This work is supported by Chandra grants AR3-4002A, AR4-5003A and GO3-4033A and NSF grant AST-0098683.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #3
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.