Chandra ACIS Survey of X-ray Point Sources: The Source Catalog

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive, uniformly processed catalog of over 363,000 X-ray sources from 10,029 Chandra ACIS observations, enabling diverse astrophysical studies and detailed source property analysis.

Contribution

It provides the largest and most uniformly processed X-ray source catalog to date, doubling the size of previous catalogs and including extensive source property estimates.

Findings

Catalog contains 363,530 detections of 217,828 sources.

Approximately 51.3% of sources within galaxy isophotes are galaxy-related.

The catalog enables studies of variability and supersoft X-ray sources.

Abstract

The $Chandra$ archival data is a valuable resource for various studies on different topics of X-ray astronomy. In this paper, we utilize this wealth and present a uniformly processed data set, which can be used to address a wide range of scientific questions. The data analysis procedures are applied to 10,029 ACIS observations, which produces 363,530 source detections, belonging to 217,828 distinct X-ray sources. This number is twice the size of the $Chandra$ Source Catalog (Version 1.1). The catalogs in this paper provide abundant estimates of the detected X-ray source properties, including source positions, counts, colors, fluxes, luminosities, variability statistics, etc. Cross-correlation of these objects with galaxies shows 17,828 sources are located within the $D_{25}$ isophotes of 1110 galaxies, and 7504 sources are located between the $D_{25}$ and 2$D_{25}$ isophotes of 910 galaxies. Contamination analysis with the log$N$--log$S$ relation indicates that 51.3\% of objects within 2$D_{25}$ isophotes are truly relevant to galaxies, and the "net" source fraction increases to 58.9\%, 67.3\%, and 69.1\% for sources with luminosities above $10^{37}$, $10^{38}$, and $10^{39}$ erg s$^{-1}$. Among the possible scientific uses of this catalog, we discuss the possibility to study intra-observation variability, inter-observation variability, and supersoft sources.