The Massive Star-Forming Regions Omnibus X-Ray Catalog, Third Installment

TL;DR

The MOXC3 catalog provides a comprehensive, high-resolution X-ray source compilation for 14 Galactic massive star-forming regions, revealing diffuse X-ray structures and aiding understanding of star formation and feedback processes.

Contribution

This third installment offers an expanded, detailed catalog of X-ray sources in multiple MSFRs, including faint sources and diffuse emission analysis, enhancing previous datasets with new spectral insights.

Findings

Diffuse X-ray emission is present in all studied regions.

High spatial resolution enables detailed analysis of star-forming environments.

Identification of faint X-ray sources improves understanding of stellar populations.

Abstract

We offer to the star formation community the third installment of the Massive Star-forming Regions (MSFRs) Omnibus X-ray Catalog (MOXC3), a compilation of X-ray point sources detected in 50 archival Chandra/ACIS observations of 14 Galactic MSFRs and surrounding fields. The MOXC3 MSFRs are NGC 2264, NGC 6193, RCW 108-IR, Aur OB1, DR15, NGC 6231, Berkeley 87, NGC 6357, AFGL 4029, h Per (NGC 869), NGC 281, Onsala 2S, G305, and RCW 49 (Wd 2); they have distances of 0.7 kpc to 4.2 kpc. Most exhibit clumped or clustered young stellar populations; several contain at least two distinct massive young stellar clusters. The total MOXC3 catalog includes 27,923 X-ray point sources. We take great care to identify even the faintest X-ray point sources across these fields. This allows us to remove this point source light, revealing diffuse X-ray structures that pervade and surround MSFRs, often generated by hot plasmas from massive star feedback. As we found in MOXC1 and MOXC2, diffuse X-ray emission is traceable in all MOXC3 MSFRs; here we perform spectral fitting to investigate the origins of selected diffuse regions. Once again, MOXC3 shows the value of high spatial resolution X-ray studies of MSFRs enabled by Chandra.