The Chandra M101 Megasecond: Diffuse Emission

Abstract

Because M101 is nearly face-on, it provides an excellent laboratory in which to study the distribution of X-ray-emitting gas in a typical late-type spiral galaxy. We obtained a Chandra observation with a cumulative exposure of roughly 1 Ms to study the diffuse X-ray emission in M101. The bulk of the X-ray emission is correlated with the star formation traced by the far-UV (FUV) emission. The global FUV/X-ray correlation is nonlinear (the X-ray surface brightness is roughly proportional to the square root of the FUV surface brightness) and the small-scale correlation is poor, probably due to the delay between the FUV emission and the X-ray production in star-forming regions. The X-ray emission contains only minor contributions from unresolved stars (lsim3%), unresolved X-ray point sources (lsim4%), and individual supernova remnants (~3%). The global spectrum of the diffuse emission can be reasonably well fitted with a three-component thermal model, but the fitted temperatures are not unique; many distributions of emission measure can produce the same temperatures when observed with the current CCD energy resolution. The spectrum of the diffuse emission depends on the environment; regions with higher X-ray surface brightnesses have relatively stronger hard components, but there is no significant evidence that the temperatures of the emitting components increase with surface brightness.