An Infrared Imaging Survey of the Faint Chandra Sources near the Galactic Centre

R.M. Bandyopadhyay1, J.C.A. Miller-Jones1,2, K.M. Blundell1, F.E. Bauer3, Ph. Podsiadlowski1, A.J. Gosling1, Q.D. Wang4, E. Pfahl5, S. Rappaport6

1Department of Astrophysics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3RH, UK, 2Astronomical Institute ``Anton Pannekoek'', University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1098 SJ, 3Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, 550 W. 120th St., New York, NY 10027, USA, 4Dept. of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA, 5Dept. of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA, 6Center for Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA,

Paper: MNRAS, 2005, in press

Weblink: http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~rmb/rmb_mn_f.ps

EPrint Server: astro-ph/0509346

Abstract:

We present near-IR imaging of a sample of the faint, hard X-ray sources discovered in the 2001 Chandra ACIS-I survey towards the Galactic Centre (GC) (Wang etal 2002). These 800 discrete sources represent an important and previously undetected population within the Galaxy. From our VLT observations of 77 X-ray sources, we identify candidate K-band counterparts to 75% of the Chandra sources in our sample. The near-IR magnitudes and colours of the majority of candidate counterparts are consistent with highly reddened stars, indicating that most of the Chandra sources are likely to be accreting binaries at or near the GC.

Preprints available from the authors at rmb@astro.ox.ac.uk , or the raw TeX (no figures) if you click here.

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