Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

This site is currently in beta, and your feedback is helping shape its ongoing development.

Return to search results

NGC 4472 Chandra X-Ray Point Source Catalog

Published by High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: February 21, 2026 | Last Modified: 2026-02-17
The Chandra X-Ray Point Source Catalog of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4472 contains the results of a Chandra ACIS-S/Hubble Space Telescope (HST) study of the point sources of this Virgo Cluster galaxy. The authors ran WAVDETECT from the CIAO 2.2 software package using wavelet scales from 1 to 16 pixels spaced by factors of 2, setting a false-source probability detection threshold of 10<sup>-6</sup>, which should yield an expectation value of slightly less than one false source over the entire ACIS-S chip. They identify 144 X-ray point sources outside the nuclear region, 72 of which are located within the HST fields. An additional 3 sources are within 8" of the center of the galaxy and appear to be associated either with a weak active galactic nucleus or with brightness enhancements in the hot interstellar gas. One additional source (not included in this table) appears to be a spurious detection, as WAVDETECT assigns it a count rate of 1.5 counts, and visual inspection fails to find evidence of a source at that location. The optical data show 1102 sources whose half-light radii are small enough to be globular cluster candidates, 829 of which also have colors consistent with being globular clusters (with only four in the restricted central 10" region). 30 X-ray sources within 0.7" of an optical source with optical colors consistent with being globular clusters were found. Two additional sources show optical colors outside the globular cluster color range and are likely to be either foreground or background objects. The thirty globular cluster matches are likely to be low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) associated with the globular clusters, while ~ 42 of the X-ray sources have no optical counterparts to V <~ 25 and I <~ 24, indicating that they are likely to be predominantly LMXBs in the field star population with a small amount of possible contamination from background active galactic nuclei. Thus approximately 40% of the X-ray sources are in globular clusters and ~ 4% of the globular clusters contain X-ray sources. This HEASARC table contains the X-ray data for the above-mentioned 147 detected X-ray sources, and the correlative optical data for the 30 optical counterparts which have colors consistent with being globular clusters. It does not contain the data from the full list of optical sources which were given in Table 2 of the reference paper. This table was created by the HEASARC in May 2007 based on CDS table J/ApJ/586/814 files table1.dat and table3.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

Find Related Datasets

Click any tag below to search for similar datasets

data.gov

An official website of the GSA's Technology Transformation Services

Looking for U.S. government information and services?
Visit USA.gov