First results from a Chandra survey of the 'Bar' region of the SMC

Abstract

We present the first results from a Chandra survey of the central region of the Small Magellanic Cloud. We detect a total of 122 sources down to a limiting luminosity of ~4.3x10^{33} erg\s (corrected for Galactic N_{H}), which is ~10 times lower than in any previous survey of the SMC. We identify 20 candidate transient sources: eighteen previously known sources in this area which are not detected in our observations, and two new bright sources. The spectral parameters of the brightest sources indicate that they are X-ray binary pulsars. The high spatial resolution of Chandra allows us to initially identify optical counterparts for 35 sources, 13 of which are new identifications.