A census of ultraluminous X-ray sources in the local Universe

Abstract

Using the Chandra Source Catalog 2.0 and a newly compiled catalogue of galaxies in the local Universe, we deliver a census of ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) populations in nearby galaxies. We find 629 ULX candidates in 309 galaxies with distance smaller than 40\,Mpc. The foreground/background contamination is $\sim 20\%$. The ULX populations in bona-fide star-forming galaxies scale on average with star-formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass ($M_{\star }$) such that the number of ULXs per galaxy is $0.45_{-0.09}^{+0.06}\times \frac{\mathrm{SFR}}{{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }\mathrm{y}{\mathrm{r}}^{-1}}+3.3_{-3.2}^{+3.8}\times \frac{M_{\star }}{{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }}$. The scaling depends strongly on the morphological type. This analysis shows that early spiral galaxies contain an additional population of ULXs that scales with $M_{\star }$. We also confirm the strong anti-correlation of the ULX rate with the host galaxy's metallicity. In the case of early-type galaxies we find that there is a non-linear dependence of the number of ULXs with $M_{\star }$, which is interpreted as the result of star-formation history differences. Taking into account age and metallicity effects, we find that the predictions from X-ray binary population synthesis models are consistent with the observed ULX rates in early-type galaxies, as well as, spiral/irregular galaxies.

21 pages, 19 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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