Statistical Characterization of the Chandra Source Catalog
Abstract
The first release of the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) contains ~95,000 X-ray sources in a total area of ~0.75% of the entire sky, using data from ~3,900 separate ACIS observations of a multitude of different types of X-ray sources. In order to maximize the scientific benefit of such a large, heterogeneous data-set, careful characterization of the statistical properties of the catalog, i.e., completeness, sensitivity, false source rate, and accuracy of source properties, is required. Characterization efforts of other, large Chandra catalogs, such as the ChaMP Point Source Catalog (Kim et al. 2007) or the 2 Mega-second Deep Field Surveys (Alexander et al. 2003), while informative, cannot serve this purpose, since the CSC analysis procedures are significantly different and the range of allowable data is much less restrictive. We describe here the characterization process for the CSC. This process includes both a comparison of real CSC results with those of other, deeper Chandra catalogs of the same targets and extensive simulations of blank-sky and point source populations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1105.0691,
title = {Statistical Characterization of the Chandra Source Catalog},
author = {Francis A. Primini and John C. Houck and John E. Davis and Michael A. Nowak and Ian N. Evans and Kenny J. Glotfelty and Craig S. Anderson and Nina R. Bonaventura and Judy C. Chen and Stephen M. Doe and Janet D. Evans and Giuseppina Fabbiano and Elizabeth C. Galle and Danny G. Gibbs and John D. Grier and Roger M. Hain and Diane M. Hall and Peter N. Harbo and Xiangqun and He and Margarita Karovska and Vinay L. Kashyap and Jennifer Lauer and Michael L. McCollough and Jonathan C. McDowell and Joseph B. Miller and Arik W. Mitschang and Douglas L. Morgan and Amy E. Mossman and Joy S. Nichols and David A. Plummer and Brian L. Refsdal and Arnold H. Rots and Aneta Siemiginowska and Beth A. Sundheim and Michael S. Tibbetts and David W. Van Stone and Sherry L. Winkelman and Panagoula Zografou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.0691},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
To be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (Fig. 52 replaced with a version which astro-ph can convert to PDF without issues.)