X-Rays Beware: The Deepest Chandra Catalogue of Point Sources in M31

TL;DR

This paper presents the most sensitive Chandra X-ray point source catalogue of M31, detecting 795 sources over 1 Ms of observations, and analyzes their luminosity functions to understand the galaxy's X-ray source populations.

Contribution

It provides the deepest Chandra X-ray catalogue of M31 with 795 sources, including 259 new detections, and offers detailed luminosity functions for different galaxy regions.

Findings

Detected 795 X-ray sources in M31 with high sensitivity.

Created the most sensitive X-ray luminosity functions for M31.

Found differences in XLF slopes between bulge and disk regions.

Abstract

This study represents the most sensitive Chandra X-ray point source catalogue of M31. Using 133 publicly available Chandra ACIS-I/S observations totalling ~1 Ms, we detected 795 X-ray sources in the bulge, northeast, and southwest fields of M31, covering an area of approximately 0.6 deg$^{2}$, to a limiting unabsorbed 0.5-8.0 keV luminosity of $10^{34}$ erg/s. In the inner bulge, where exposure is approximately constant, X-ray fluxes represent average values because they were determined from many observations over a long period of time. Similarly, our catalogue is more complete in the bulge fields since monitoring allowed more transient sources to be detected. The catalogue was cross-correlated with a previous XMM-Newton catalogue of M31's $D_{25}$ isophote consisting of 1948 X-ray sources, with only 979 within the field of view of our survey. We found 387 (49%) of our Chandra sources (352 or 44% unique sources) matched to within 5 arcsec of 352 XMM-Newton sources. Combining this result with matching done to previous Chandra X-ray sources we detected 259 new sources in our catalogue. We created X-ray luminosity functions (XLFs) in the soft (0.5-2.0 keV) and hard (2.0-8.0 keV) bands that are the most sensitive for any large galaxy based on our detection limits. Completeness-corrected XLFs show a break around $1.3\times10^{37}$ erg/s, consistent with previous work. As in past surveys, we find the bulge XLFs are flatter than the disk, indicating a lack of bright high-mass X-ray binaries in the disk and an aging population of low-mass X-ray binaries in the bulge.