The Chandra Galactic Bulge Survey: Optical catalogue and point-source counterparts to X-ray sources

Abstract

As part of the Chandra Galactic Bulge Survey (GBS), we present a catalogue of optical sources in the GBS footprint. This consists of two regions centred at Galactic latitude b = 1°.5 above and below the Galactic Centre, spanning (l × b) = (6° × 1°). The catalogue consists of two or more epochs of observations for each line of sight in r', i' and Hα filters. The catalogue is complete down to r' = 20.2 and i' = 19.2 mag; the mean 5σ depth is r' = 22.5 and i' = 21.1 mag. The mean root-mean-square residuals of the astrometric solutions is 0.04 arcsec. We cross-correlate this optical catalogue with the 1640 unique X-ray sources detected in Chandra observations of the GBS area, and find candidate optical counterparts to 1480 X-ray sources. We use a false alarm probability analysis to estimate the contamination by interlopers, and expect ~10 per cent of optical counterparts to be chance alignments. To determine the most likely counterpart for each X-ray source, we compute the likelihood ratio for all optical sources within the 4σ X-ray error circle. This analysis yields 1480 potential counterparts (~90 per cent of the sample). 584 counterparts have saturated photometry (r' ≤ 17, i' ≤ 16), indicating these objects are likely foreground sources and the real counterparts. 171 candidate counterparts are detected only in the i' band. These sources are good qLMXB and CV candidates as they are X-ray bright and likely located in the Bulge.