Identification of selected sources from the ROSAT Galactic Plane Survey. I

Abstract

We report on optical searches in the error circles of 93 ROSAT survey sources located at low galactic latitudes (\b\ < 20°). These sources were extracted from the ROSAT Galactic Plane Survey using various selection criteria on hardness ratio, X-ray and optical brightness and integrated galactic absorption in the direction of the source. We find optical identifications in 76 cases, among which are 25 new AGN, 6 new CVs and a new Be/X-ray binary. In order to illustrate the relevance of the source selections applied here, we cross-correlated the ROSAT all-sky survey bright source list with SIMBAD. Different classes of X-ray emitters populate distinct regions of a multi dimensional parameter space involving flux ratios, galactic latitude and NH. This relatively good segregation offers the possibility to build source samples with enhanced probability of identification with a given class. Complete optical identification of such subsamples could eventually be used to compute meaningful probabilities of identification for all sources using as basis a restricted set of multi-wavelength information.