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B.J. Wargelin, A. Dalgarno, R.J. Edgar, M. Juda, V. Kharchenko, P.P. Plucinsky, J.C. Raymond, J.D. Slavin (CfA), T.E. Cravens (U. of Kansas)
The LOX project will analyze Chandra archival data to search for and quantify the contribution of solar-wind charge exchange (CX) to the soft X-ray background (SXRB). Solar-wind CX is now acknowledged to be the source of the Long-Term Enhancements seen by ROSAT and of the time-variable line emission seen in Chandra observations of the dark side of the Moon and the molecular cloud MBM 12, and in XMM-Newton observations of the Hubble Deep Field-North. CX also accounts for a significant but poorly determined fraction of the SXRB emission recorded by ROSAT in the All-Sky Survey. Our ultimate goal is to create accurate temporal, spatial, and spectral models of geocoronal and heliospheric CX emission that can then be used to ``correct'' the ROSAT results and deduce the true level of cosmic SXRB emission, which may substantially revise our understanding of the local ISM, particularly the Local Bubble. These CX models can also be used to enable more accurate subtraction of background emission in observations of extended sources by X-ray missions such as Chandra, XMM-Newton, and ASTRO-E2, and to provide constraints on the flux of interstellar hydrogen in the heliosphere that are complementary to those provided by pickup ion measurements.
This work is supported by NASA's Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) Archival Research Program under Grant AR4-5001X. BW, RE, MJ, PP, and JS are also supported by NASA contract NAS8-39073 to the CXC. khan%
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.