The Chandra Multiwavelength Project:Galactic Plane Survey Chandra X-ray Observatory National Optical Astronomy Observatory



The ChaMPlane survey is being conducted at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Chandra Multiwavelength Plane Survey

Measuring the X-Ray Binary and Stellar Content of the Galaxy

The Chandra Multiwavelength Plane (ChaMPlane) Survey is a project to identify a large sample of serendipitous X-ray sources located to arcsec precision in deep ~> 20 ksec) galactic plane fields (|b| ~< 10 degree) imaged by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These sources include cataclysmic variables (CVs), quiescent low mass X-ray binaries (qLMXBs: which includes both black hole and neutron star systems), Be X-ray binaries and stellar coronal sources (see Grindlay et al. (2005) for general description). The primary science objective of this project is to measure, or constrain, the luminosity functions of compact X-ray binaries and CVs. The ChaMPlane project is currently supported by NASA (Chandra Archive), NOAO, and NSF.

The figure is an optical Mosaic image of field centered on the black hole X-ray nova GRO J0422+32 (stacked 10 dithered R images; total exposure time: 2100 sec; North-left, west-up, FOV: 9'x9'). Chandra ACIS chip boundaries (green lines) and X-ray source positions (red circles) are superimposed on the image. Small green circles are the Chandra optical counterparts. The small square in the center marks the Chandra pointing aimpoint.


ChaMPlane Team: Jonathan Grindlay (PI), Jaesub Hong, Silas Laycock, Maureen van den Berg, Ping Zhao