X-ray Astronomy and the IR Background

Abstract

I review the recent Chandra results on the sources of the X-ray background and the X-ray properties of the SCUBA sources. We conclude that 10–20% of the IR background is produced by active galaxies and a similar fraction of the SCUBA sources harbor luminous AGN. Many of the Chandra sources are apparently luminous infrared galaxies themselves, but factors of 2–10 below the SCUBA limits. We summarize the X-ray evidence for metal production in groups and clusters and point out that these data require considerably more star formation than inferred from optical stellar data. The abundance ratios of Fe and Si indicate that much of the metals in groups and clusters was produced by massive stars, and the lack of evolution in Fe out to z ~ 0.5 argues for quite an early origin for the metals. This same process also seems to have injected considerable energy into the gas in groups and clusters, which may have dominated the mechanism of star formation and produced a metal-enriched intergalactic medium