An X-ray photometry system I: Chandra ACIS

Abstract

We present a system of X-ray photometry for the Chandra satellite. X-ray photometry can be a powerful tool to obtain flux estimates, hardness ratios, and colors unbiased by assumptions about spectral shape and independent of temporal and spatial changes in instrument characteristics. The system we have developed relies on our knowledge of effective area and the energy-to-channel conversion to construct filters similar to photometric filters in the optical bandpass. We show that the filters are well behaved functions of energy and that this X-ray photometric system is able to reconstruct fluxes to within about 20%, without color corrections, for non-pathological spectra. Even in the worst cases it is better than 50%. Our method also treats errors in a consistent manner, both statistical as well as systematic.

accepted by ApJ, 19 pages, 15 figures corresponding code available at http://hea-www.cfa.harvard.edu/~jcm/xray/index.html

References in corpus (6)

• High-Redshift Quasars Found in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Commissioning Data
• Identifying X-ray Sources in Bulge and Disk Galaxies from X-ray Colors
• X-ray spectral transitions of black holes from RXTE All-Sky Monitor
• Composition of the Chandra ACIS contaminant
• The Flight Spectral Response of the ACIS Instrument
• The X-ray binary population in M33: II. X-ray spectra and variability

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Chandra Source Catalog
• Accounting for Calibration Uncertainties in X-ray Analysis: Effective Areas in Spectral Fitting
• X-ray fluorescent lines from the Compton-thick AGN in M51
• X-ray Emission of the $\gamma$-ray Loud Young Radio Galaxy NGC 3894
• The X-ray Binary-Star Cluster Connection in Late-Type Galaxies
• X-ray photometry