English

Optical and Infrared Properties of the 2 Ms Chandra Deep Field-North X-ray Sources

Astrophysics 2009-11-07 v1

Abstract

We present an optical and NIR catalog for the X-ray sources in the 2 Ms Chandra observation of the Hubble Deep Field-North region. We have high-quality multicolor images of all 503 X-ray point sources and reliable spectroscopic redshifts for 284. We spectroscopically identify six z>1 type II quasars. Our spectroscopic completeness for the R<24 sources is 87%. The spectroscopic redshift distribution shows two broad redshift spikes that have clearly grown over those originally seen in the 1 Ms exposure. The spectroscopically identified extragalactic sources already comprise 75% of the measured 2-8 keV light. Redshift slices versus 2-8 keV flux show that an impressive 54% of the measured 2-8 keV light arises from sources at z<1 and 68% from sources at z<2. We use seven broadband colors and a Bayesian photometric redshift estimation code to obtain photometric redshifts. The photometric redshifts are within 25% of the spectroscopic redshifts for 94% of the non-broad-line sources with both photometric and spectroscopic measurements. We use our wide wavelength coverage to determine rest-frame colors for the X-ray sources with spectroscopic or photometric redshifts. Many of the X-ray sources have the rest-frame colors of evolved red galaxies and there is very little evolution in these colors with redshift. We also determine absolute magnitudes and find that many of the non-broad-line sources are more luminous than Mstar, even at high redshifts. We therefore infer that deep X-ray observations may provide an effective way of locating Mstar galaxies with colors similar to present-day early-type galaxies to high redshifts. (Abridged)

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0306212,
  title  = {Optical and Infrared Properties of the 2 Ms Chandra Deep Field-North X-ray Sources},
  author = {A. J. Barger and L. L. Cowie and P. Capak and D. M. Alexander and F. E. Bauer and E. Fernandez and W. N. Brandt and G. P. Garmire and A. E. Hornschemeier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0306212},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

August 2003 issue of The Astronomical Journal, 15 pages, Table A1 and Fig A1 can be found at http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~barger/cdfn2.html