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Description
This contains some of the results from the first high spatial resolution X-ray study of the massive star-forming region NGC 6357, which were obtained in a 38 ks Chandra/ACIS observation. Inside the brightest constituent of this large H II region complex is the massive open cluster Pismis 24. It contains two of the brightest and bluest stars known, yet remains poorly studied; only a handful of optically bright stellar members have been identified. The authors have investigated the cluster extent and initial mass function and detected ~800 X-ray sources with a limiting sensitivity of ~ 10<sup>30</sup> erg s<sup>-1</sup>: this provides the first reliable probe of the rich intermediate-mass and low-mass population of this massive cluster, increasing the number of known members from optical studies by a factor of ~ 50. The high-luminosity end (log L[2-8 keV] >= 30.3 erg s<sup>-1</sup>) of the observed X-ray luminosity function in NGC 6357 is clearly consistent with a power-law relation as seen in the Orion Nebula Cluster and Cepheus B, yielding the first estimate of NGC 6357's total cluster population, a few times the known Orion population. The long-standing L<sub>X</sub> ~ 10<sup>-7</sup> L<sub>bol</sub> correlation for O stars is confirmed. Twenty-four candidate O stars and one possible new obscured massive YSO or Wolf-Rayet star are presented. Many cluster members are estimated to be intermediate-mass stars from available infrared photometry (assuming an age of ~ 1 Myr), but only a few exhibit K-band excess. The authors report the first detection of X-ray emission from an evaporating gaseous globule at the tip of a molecular pillar; this source is likely a B0-B2 protostar. NGC 6357 was observed on 2004 July 9 with the Imaging Array of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS-I) on board Chandra. Four front-illuminated (FI) CCDs form the ACIS-I, which covers a field of view (FOV) of ~ 17 by 17 arcminutes. The observation was made in the standard Timed Exposure, Very Faint mode, with 3.2 s integration time and 5 pixel by 5 pixel event islands. The total exposure time was 38 ks and the satellite roll angle was 289 degrees. The aim point was centered on the O3 If star Pis 24-1, the heart of the OB association Pismis 24. The Chandra observation ID is 4477. Data reduction started with filtering the Level 1 event list processed by the Chandra X-ray Center pipeline to recover an improved Level 2 event list. To improve absolute astrometry, X-ray positions of ACIS-I sources were obtained by running the wavdetect wavelet-based source detection algorithm within the Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations (CIAO) package on the original Level 2 event list, using only the central 8 by 8 arcminutes of the field. The resulting X-ray sources were matched to the 2MASS point source catalog. The authors calculated the position offsets between 277 X-ray sources and their NIR counterparts and applied an offset of +0.02" in right ascension (R.A.) and -0.33" in declination to the X-ray coordinates. From an initial list of 910 potential X-ray sources, the authors rejected sources with a P<sub>B</sub> > 1% likelihood of being a background fluctuation. The trimmed source list includes 779 sources, with full-band (0.5 - 8.0 keV) net (background-subtracted) counts ranging from 1.7 to 1837 counts. The 779 valid sources were purposely divided by the authors into two lists: the 665 sources with P<sub>B</sub> < 0.1% make up the primary source list of highly reliable sources (Table 1 in the reference paper; sources with source_type = 'M' in this table), and the remaining 114 sources with P<sub>B</sub> >= 0.1% likelihood of being spurious background fluctuations were listed as tentative sources in Table 2 of the reference paper (source_type = 'T' in this table). The authors believe that most of these tentative sources are likely real detections. This table was created by the HEASARC in October 2007 based on the merger of the electronic versions of Tables 1 (Main Source Catalog) and 2 (Tentative Sources which were obtained from the ApJ website. To help distinguish from which original table entries in this Browse table come from, the HEASARC has created a parameter called source_type which is set to 'M' for sources from Table 1 and to 'T' for sources from Table 2. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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