2023 Departmental Poster Competition

Our nearest star-forming galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has been largely neglected in X-ray binary (XRB) populations studies targeting quiescent luminosities. In Chandra Cycle 24, we were awarded a Very Large Program (1 Msec) to perform a comprehensive survey of sources brighter than 2×10^32 erg s^(−1) in 10 LMC fields dominated by young (10 – 100 Myr) stellar populations of different ages, matching those sampled in the similar survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). This luminosity limit probes all active XRBs and reaches into the regime of quiescent binaries and X-ray emitting normal stars. This program will provide the deepest X-ray luminosity functions (XLFs) for XRBs ever recorded, and in combination with the SMC survey will allow us to directly measure their formation efficiency as a function of age and metallicity and address the XLF evolution in the 10 – 100 Myr range. Here we present the first promising results from the analysis of the first observations of the LMC fields.