ChandraX‐Ray Sources in M101

A deep (98.2 ks) Chandra Cycle-1 observation has revealed a wealth ofdiscrete X-ray sources as well as diffuse emission in the nearby face-on spiralgalaxy M101. From this rich dataset we have created a catalog of the 110sources from the S3 chip detected with a significance of >3 sigma,corresponding to a flux of ~1.0E-16 ergs/cm/cm/s and a luminosity of 1.0E36ergs/s for a distance to M101 of 7.2 Mpc. The sources display a distinctcorrelation with the spiral arms and include a variety of X-ray binaries,supersoft sources, supernova remnants, and other objects of which only ~27 arelikely to be background sources. There are only a few sources in the interarmregions, and most of these have X-ray colors consistent with that of backgroundAGNs. The derived log N-log S relation for the sources in M101 (backgroundsubtracted) has a slope of -0.80+/-0.05 over the range of 1.0E36 - 1.0E38ergs/s. The nucleus is resolved into 2 nearly identical X-ray sources, eachwith a 0.5-2.0 keV flux of 4.0E37 ergs/s. One of these sources coincides withthe optical nucleus, and the other coincides with a cluster of stars 110 pc tothe south.Comment: 39 pages including 13 figures and 4 tables; ApJ, in pres