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Description
The aim of this study is to identify the so far unknown low mass stellar population of the ~2 Myr old Cygnus OB2 star forming region, and to investigate the X-ray and near-IR stellar properties of its members. The authors analyzed a 97.7ks Chandra ACIS-I observation pointed at the core of the Cygnus OB2 region. Sources were detected using the PWDETECT code and were positionally correlated with optical and near-IR catalogs from the literature. Source events were extracted with the ACIS EXTRACT package. X-ray variability was characterized through the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and spectra were fitted using absorbed APEC thermal plasma models. The authors detected 1003 X-ray sources. Of these, 775 have near-IR counterparts and are expected to be almost all associated with Cygnus OB2 members. From near-IR color-color and color-magnitude diagrams, they estimate a typical absorption toward Cygnus OB2 of A<sub>V</sub> ~ 7.0 mag. Although the region is young, very few stars (~ 4.4%) show disk-induced excesses in the near-IR. X-ray variability is detected in ~ 13% of the sources, but this fraction increases, up to 50%, with increasing source statistics. Flares account for at least 60% of the variability. Despite being generally bright, all but 2 of the 26 detected O-type and early B-type stars are not significantly variable. Typical X-ray spectral parameters are log N<sub>H</sub> ~ 22.25 (cm<sup>-2</sup>) and kT ~ 1.35 keV with 1-sigma dispersion of 0.2 dex and 0.4 keV, respectively. Variable and flaring sources have harder spectra with median kT = 3.3 and 3.8 keV, respectively. OB stars are typically softer (kT ~ 0.75 keV). X-ray luminosities range between 10<sup>30</sup> and 10<sup>31</sup> erg s<sup>-1</sup> for intermediate-mass and low-mass stars, and between 2.5 x 10<sup>30</sup> and 6.3 x 10<sup>33</sup> erg s<sup>-1</sup> for OB stars. Cygnus OB2 was observed with the ACIS detector on board the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) on 2004 January 16 (Obs.Id. 4511; PI: E. Flaccomio). The ACIS-I 17' x 17' field of view is covered by 4 chips each with 1024 x 1024 pixels (scale 0.49 arcseconds per pixel). The observation was pointed towards J2000.0 (RA,Dec) = (20 33 12.2, +41 15 00.7). An SNR threshold of 4.5 sigma was chosen which resulted in an initial source list of 1054 sources, 51 of which were subsequently rejected as either instrumental artifacts or multiple detections of the same source with different spatial scales. An additional 10 of the 1003 X-ray sources in the present table are likely spurious statistical fluctuations rather than real sources. This table was created by the HEASARC in March 2008 based on <a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/464/211">CDS catalog J/A+A/464/211</a> files table1.dat, table2.dat and table3.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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