We present a new five-epoch Chandra X-ray Observatory monitoring survey of the nearby spiral galaxy M33 which probes X-ray variability with time sampling between two weeks and four months. We characterize the X-ray variability of 55 bright point sources outside of the nucleus, many of which are expected to be high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). We detect eight new candidate transients not detected in previous X-ray catalogs of M33 and discuss their possible nature. The final catalog includes 26 known HMXB candidates identified in the literature. We extend the baseline of the X-ray light curves up to 21 yr by including archival X-ray observations of these sources. We compare the detection and nondetection epochs of the sources to suites of simulated source duty cycles and infer that most of our detected sources have duty cycles >30%. We find only four sources whose detection patterns are consistent with having duty cycles below 30%. This large fraction of sources with high duty cycles is unexpected for a population of HMXBs; thus more frequent X-ray monitoring will likely reveal many more low duty cycle HMXBs in M33.
Monitoring the X-Ray Variability of Bright X-Ray Sources in M33
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We thank the referee for helpful comments on the manuscript. Support for this work was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through Chandra Award No. GO1-22080X issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Administration under contract NAS8-03060. The scientific results reported in this article are based on observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This work has made use of SAOImageDS9, developed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (Joye & Mandel 2003).
This paper employs a list of Chandra data sets, obtained by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, contained in doi:10.25574/cdc.158. A full table of extracted source properties, including all extraction results reported by AE, is available in Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.10359726.
Software References
Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations (CIAO; Fruscione et al. 2006), ACIS-Extract (Broos et al. 2012), Bayesian Estimation of Hardness Ratios (BEHR; Park et al. 2006)
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1538-4357
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- GO1-22080X
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NAS8-03060