Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Skip to content

RCW 108 Star Formation Region Chandra X-Ray Point Source Catalog

Metadata Updated: August 30, 2025

This table contains some of the results of an approximately 90 ks Chandra observation of a complex region that hosts multiple sites of recent and active star formation in ARA OB1a. The field is centered on the embedded cluster RCW 108-IR and includes a large portion of the open cluster NGC 6193. The authors detected over 420 X-ray sources in the field and combined these data with deep near-IR, Spitzer/IRAC and Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) mid-IR data. They find that about 360 of the X-ray sources have near-IR counterparts. They divide the region into five parts based on the X-ray point source characteristics and extended 8 micron emission. The most clearly defined regions are the central region, identified by embedded sources with high luminosities in the both the near-IR and X-ray as well as high X-ray temperatures (~3 keV), and the eastern region, identified by low extinction and ~1 keV X-ray temperatures. Other regions, identified by their directional relationship to RCW 108-IR, are less uniform, representing combinations of the first two regions, independent star formation epochs, or both. The cluster members range in X-ray luminosity from 10<sup>29</sup> to 10<sup>33</sup> erg s<sup>-1</sup>. Over 18% of the cluster members with over 100 counts exhibit flares. All sources with over 350 counts are variable. Overall about 10% (16% in RCW 108-IR) appear to have optically thick disks as derived from their position in the (J - H), (H - K) diagram. The disk fraction becomes much higher when IRAC data are employed. The largest fraction of X-ray sources is best described as possessing some disk material via a more detailed extinction fitting. The authors fit the bulk of the X-ray spectra as absorbed Raymond-Smith-type plasmas, and find that the column to the RCW 108-IR members varies from 10<sup>21</sup> to 10<sup>23</sup> cm<sup>-2</sup>. They find that the field contains 41 candidate O or B stars, and estimate that the total number of pre-main-sequence stars in the field is about 1600 +/- 200. Approximately 800 are confined to the 3' (~1.1 pc) central region. The field was observed by Chandra on 2004 October 25 starting at 02:37 UT for 92.2 ks of total time and 88.8 ks of so-called "good-time" (ObsId 4503). The ACIS was used in the nominal imaging array (chips I0-I3) which provides a field of view of approximately 17' by 17' (~6.5 pc on a side). The aimpoint was at RA, Dec = 16:39:58.7, -48:51:54.4 (J2000.0). In addition, the S2 and S3 chips were on and located over IRAS 16379-4856. About 20 point sources were detected associated with this object; however, the analysis of these data is not presented here because they are far off-axis. This table was created by the HEASARC in June 2008 based on electronic versions of Tables 1, 2, 5, 7, 10 and 11 from the reference paper which were obtained from the Astronomical Journal web site. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025
Publisher High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
Maintainer
Identifier ivo://nasa.heasarc/rcw108cxo
Data Last Modified 2025-08-27
Category Astrophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 6c94a122-e361-4830-9c28-25888b8f5fd1
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/rcw108cxo.html
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 6216acb7f5f4f7d6a2c7abc7e9af998a2c51f79c252eaeb797c59c849d879309
Source Schema Version 1.1

Didn't find what you're looking for? Suggest a dataset here.