A Catalog of Chandra X-ray Sources in the Carina Nebula

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of approximately 14,000 X-ray sources in the Carina Nebula, derived from Chandra observations, providing a valuable resource for studying young stellar populations.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive, calibrated catalog of X-ray sources in the Carina Nebula, including data reduction, source detection, and multi-wavelength counterpart identification.

Findings

Catalog contains ~14,000 X-ray sources.

Complete detection down to ~10^{30.7} erg/s luminosity.

Provides a foundation for future stellar population studies.

Abstract

We present a catalog of ~14,000 X-ray sources observed by the ACIS instrument on the Chandra X-ray Observatory within a 1.42 square degree survey of the Great Nebula in Carina, known as the Chandra Carina Complex Project (CCCP). This study appears in a Special Issue of the ApJS devoted to the CCCP. Here, we describe the data reduction and analysis procedures performed on the X-ray observations, including calibration and cleaning of the X-ray event data, point source detection, and source extraction. The catalog appears to be complete across most of the field to an absorption-corrected total-band luminosity of ~10^{30.7} erg/s for a typical low-mass pre-main sequence star. Counterparts to the X-ray sources are identified in a variety of visual, near-infrared, and mid-infrared surveys. The X-ray and infrared source properties presented here form the basis of many CCCP studies of the young stellar populations in Carina.