A Chandra catalog of X-ray sources in the central 150 pc of the Galaxy

We present the catalog of X-ray sources detected in a shallow Chandra survey of the inner 2 degrees x0.degrees 8 of the Galaxy and in two deeper observations of the Radio Arches and Sgr B2. The catalog contains 1352 objects that are highly absorbed (N-H greater than or similar to 4x10(22) cm(-2)) and are therefore likely to lie near the Galactic center (D approximate to 8 kpc), and 549 less absorbed sources that lie within less than or similar to 6 kpc of Earth. On the basis of the inferred luminosities of the X-ray sources and the expected numbers of various classes of objects, we suggest that the sources with L-X less than or similar to 10(33) ergs s(-1) that comprise approximate to 90% of the catalog are cataclysmic variables and that the approximate to 100 brighter objects are accreting neutron stars and black holes, young isolated pulsars, and Wolf-Rayet and O (WR/O) stars in colliding-wind binaries. We find that the spatial distribution of X-ray sources matches that of the old stellar population observed in the infrared, which supports our suggestion that most of the X-ray sources are old cataclysmic variables. However, we find that there is an apparent excess of approximate to 10 bright sources in the Radio Arches region. That region is already known to be the site of recent star formation, so we suggest that the bright sources in this region are young high-mass X-ray binaries, pulsars, or WR/O star binaries. We briefly discuss some astrophysical questions that this catalog can be used to address.