The Chandra Carina Complex Project: Massive Stars

M. Gagne1, L. Townsley2, M. Corcoran3, D. Cohen4, K. Dickerson1, L.M. Oskinova5, Yael Naze6, and P. Broos2

1 West Chester University, USA
2 Penn State University, USA
3 NASA/GSFC, USA
4 Swarthmore College, USA
5 Institut für Physik und Astronomie, Universität Potsdam, Germany
6 Universite de Liege, Belgium

The Great Nebula in Carina is a superb site to study the violent massive star formation and feedback that typifies giant HII regions and starburst galaxies. We have combined 20 deep, new Chandra ACIS-I pointings with two existing ACIS-I fields to map over one square degree of the Carina complex. A state-of-the-art source detection algorithm has been used to create a catalog of 14,368 x-ray sources, the great majority with counterparts at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. Carina contains the largest catalogued population of OB stars within 3 kpc, including many known binaries. In this paper, we report on the 130 x-ray detected OB and Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Carina complex. We use their x-ray spectra and light curves to categorize their x-ray emission. Not surprisingly, we find that the known OB and WolfRayet binaries have hard x-ray spectra and high Lx/Lbol strongly suggesting colling wind shocks. Most of the single OB stars have generally lower shock temperatures and lower Lx/Lbol, suggesting wind shocks embedded in the wind. About a dozen of the apparently single OB stars have harder x-ray spectra, and some time variability, possibly suggesting magnetically confined wind shocks, or flaring T Tauri companions.

ADS link:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010HEAD...11.1712G

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