Results from five Chandra observations of the normal galaxy NGC 3877

Abstract

We present the results of five Chandra observations of the normal galaxy NGC 3877. A total of 27 X-ray sources are detected, including SN 1998S. We find 15 sources to be variable during the 646-day period covered by the observations. We use two methods to determine source color and find no apparent correlation between color and brightness in our population sample. We provide flux and luminosity estimates for every source and construct cumulative X-ray luminosity functions (XLFs) for each observation. We find a higher density of luminous ([approximately] 10³⁷ erg s⁻¹) sources in NGC 3877 than we see in two other galaxies. We tentatively identify some sources as X-ray binaries.