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.

NGC 6530 Chandra Point Source Optical/IR Identifications Catalog

Published by High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: February 14, 2026 | Last Modified: 2026-02-10
The authors have obtained astrometry and BVI photometry, down to a V magnitude of ~22, of the very young open cluster NGC 6530, from observations taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) camera at the MPG/ESO 2.2m Telescope. They have positionally matched their optical catalog with the list of X-ray sources found in a Chandra-ACIS observation of this cluster (Damiani et al. 2004, ApJ, 608, 781: available in Browse both via links from this table and also as the NGC6530CXO table), finding a total of 828 stars in common, 90% of which are pre-main sequence stars in NGC 6530. The data used in this work come from the combination of optical BVI images taken with the WFI camera made on 27-28 July 2000, a 60 ks Chandra ACIS X-ray observation, and public near-infrared data from the All-Sky Catalog of Point Sources of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS, CDS Cat. <II/24>). The total number of optical sources falling in the Chandra FOV is 8956, while the Damiani et al. (2004, ApJ, 608, 781) Catalog contains 884 X-ray sources, who concluded that at least 90% of the X-ray sources are very probable cluster members. To cross-correlate the X-ray and optical catalogs, the authors used a matching distance of < 4 sigmaX, where sigmaX is the the X-ray positional error, or 1.5", whichever is smaller, after a systematic shift between the X-ray and WFI positions of 0.2" in RA and -0.26" in Dec had been included. This resulted in a number of multiple identifications, among which 4 turned into unique identifications when a reduced distance of 1.5" was used. This finally resulted in 721 single, 44 double, and 3 triple identifications in the optical catalog; in addition, one X-ray source has 4 optical identifications, and another has 6 optical identifications. The total number of X-ray sources with WFI counterparts is therefore 770; of them, only 15 X-ray identified stars come from the Sung et al. (2000, AJ, 120, 333) Catalog and are not in the WFI Catalog. The total number of optical sources with an X-ray counterpart is 828. The agreement between X-ray and WFI optical positions is excellent in most cases, with offsets below 1". This database table was created by the HEASARC in February 2007, based on CDS table J/A+A/430/941/table5.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