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| Paper: |
Chandra Observations of the Stellar Populations and Diffuse Gas in Nearby Galaxies |
| Volume: |
249, The Central Kiloparsec of Starbursts and AGN: the La Palma Connection |
| Page: |
425 |
| Authors: |
Zezas, Andreas; Fabbiano, G.; Prestwich, A.; Murray, S.; Ward, M. |
| Abstract: |
We present Chandra observations of two star-forming galaxies (M82 and The Antennae) and three starburst/AGN composite galaxies (NGC 1808, NGC 6240, and NGC 7331). In both star-forming galaxies we detect a large number of sources with diverse properties. Some of them can be identified as X-ray binaries, based on their variability and spectra. However, there is a significant number of very soft and/or extended sources which could be supernova remnants. These observations confirm previous indications that there is a population of sources with X-ray luminosities much higher than the Eddington limit for a neutron star, suggesting that these objects are abundant in star-forming galaxies. We find that the X-ray luminosity functions of the discrete sources in these two galaxies are very similar. In the case of the composite galaxies we find that the AGN do not dominate their X-ray emission. A significant fraction of the emission from these objects is extended but there are also X-ray sources associated with circumnuclear star-formation. We thank Phil Kaaret and Vicky Kalogera for useful discussions. This work has been supported by NASA contracts NAS 8--39073 (CXC) and NAS8-38248 (HRC) and Chandra grant G01-2116X. |
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