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Curtis DeWitt |
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The Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered nearly 10000 X-ray point sources in a 2 degree x0.8 degree region toward the Galactic Center. The majority of these sources are spectrally hard, implying high extinction and a distance at or beyond the Galactic Center. If in the Galactic Center, these X-ray sources are likely to be a mix of X-ray binaries, such LMXBs, HMXBs, intermediate polars and wind-colliding binaries. We used the ISPI instrument to obtain JHKs photometry of the 17'x17' region around SGR A* and found 2137 NIR astrometric matches to 4268 X-ray sources. This region is extremely crowded, however, and of the matched hard X-ray sources, only 11% are likely the real counterpart. We adopt a statistical approach, and calculate the likely CMD positions of the true counterparts. We also determine which source properties maximize the probability of finding a true counterpart. We used the newly commissioned LUCIFER instrument on the Large Binocular Telescope to perform R=2000 HK spectroscopic followup on a number of NIR counterparts and we report the discovery of a candidate HMXB with possible accretion signatures. |