A Rich Population of X-ray Emitting Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Galactic Starburst Cluster Westerlund 1

Abstract

Recent optical and IR studies have revealed that the heavily-reddened starburst cluster Westerlund 1 (Wd 1) contains at least 22 Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars, comprising the richest WR population of any galactic cluster. We present results of a senstive Chandra X-ray observation of Wd 1 which detected 12 of the 22 known WR stars and the mysterious emission line star W9. The fraction of detected WN stars is nearly identical to that of WC stars. The WN stars WR-A and WR-B as well as W9 are exceptionally luminous in X-rays and have similar hard heavily-absorbed spectra with strong Si XIII and S XV emission lines. The luminous high-temperature X-ray emission of these three stars is characteristic of colliding wind binary systems but their binary status remains to be determined. Spectral fits of the X-ray bright sources WR-A and W9 with isothermal plane-parallel shock models require high absorption column densities log N${}_H$ = 22.56 (cm${}^{-2}$) and yield characteristic shock temperatures kT_shock ~ 3 keV (T ~ 35 MK).

ApJL, 2006, in press (3 figures, 1 table)

References in corpus (1)

• Further Wolf-Rayet stars in the starburst cluster Westerlund 1

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