ULX candidates in nearby Arp galaxies

This suggests that for these galaxies, ULXs trace recent star formation. However, for the most infrared-luminous galaxies, we find a deficiency of ULXs compared to the infrared luminosity. For these very infrared-luminous galaxies, active galactic nuclei may contribute to powering the far-infrared; alternatively, ULXs may be highly obscured in the X-ray in these galaxies and therefore not detected by these Chandra observations.

We determined local UV/optical colors within the galaxies in the vicinity of the candidate ULXs using Galaxy Evolution Explorer UV and Sloan Digitized Sky Survey optical images. In most cases, the distributions of colors are similar to the global colors of interacting galaxies. However, the u-g and r-i colors at the ULX locations tend to be bluer on average than these global colors, suggesting that ULXs are preferentially found in regions with young stellar populations.

In the Arp sample there is a possible enhancement of a factor of ~2-5 in the fraction of galactic nuclei that are X-ray-bright compared to more normal spirals.