The ChaMP Extended Stellar Survey (ChESS): Photometric and Spectroscopic Properties of Serendipitously Detected Stellar X-ray Sources

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ChESS catalog of 348 stellar X-ray sources from the ChaMP and SDSS surveys, providing new insights into stellar activity, luminosities, and population characteristics across different Galactic disk ages.

Contribution

The study presents a new, extensive catalog of stellar X-ray emitters with detailed photometric and spectroscopic properties, bridging the gap between nearby and distant X-ray star surveys.

Findings

Catalog contains 348 X-ray emitting stars with distances and luminosities.

L_(Halpha)/L_(bol) correlates linearly with L_(X)/L_(bol) below a threshold.

Sample shows a split between young and old disk stellar populations.

Abstract

We present 348 X-ray emitting stars identified from correlating the Extended Chandra Multiwavelength Project (ChaMP), a serendipitous wide-area X-ray survey, with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We use morphological star/galaxy separation, an SDSS quasar catalog, an optical color-magnitude cut, and X-ray data quality tests to create our catalog, the ChaMP Extended Stellar Survey (ChESS), from a sample of 2121 matched ChaMP/SDSS sources. Our cuts retain 92% of the spectroscopically confirmed stars while excluding 99.6% of the 684 spectoscopically confirmed extragalactic sources. Fewer than 3% of the sources in our final catalog are previously identified stellar X-ray emitters; we expect ~10% of the catalog is composed by giants, and identify seven giant stars and three cataclysmic variables. We derive distances, X-ray and bolometric luminosities for these stars, revealing that this catalog fills the gap between the nearby stars identified by the ROSAT All-Sky Survey and the more distant stars detected in deep Chandra and XMM-Newton surveys. For 36 newly identified X-ray emitting M stars we calculate L_(Halpha)/L_(bol). L_(H\alpha)/L_(bol) and L_(X)/L_(bol) are linearly related below L_(X)/L_(bol) ~ 3 x 10^(-4), while L_(Halpha)/L_(bol) appears to turn over at larger L_(X)/L_(bol) values. Stars with reliable SDSS photometry have an ~0.1 mag blue excess in (u-g), likely due to increased chromospheric continuum emission. Photometric metallicity estimates suggest the sample is split between the young and old disk populations of the Galaxy; the lowest activity sources belong to the old disk population, a clear signature of the decay of magnetic activity with age. Future papers will present analyses of source variability and comparisons of this catalog to models of stellar activity in the Galactic disk.