  Chandra observations of the X-ray faint elliptical galaxy NGC 4697 resolve
much of the X-ray emission (61% within one effective radius) into ~80 point
sources, of which most are low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs). These LMXBs provide
the bulk of the hard emission and much of the soft emission as well. Of the
remaining unresolved emission, it is likely that about half is from fainter
LMXBs, while the other half (~23% of the total emission) is from interstellar
gas. Three of the resolved sources are supersoft sources. In the outer regions
of NGC 4697, eight of the LMXBs (about 25%) are coincident with candidate
globular clusters, which indicates that globulars have a high probability of
containing X-ray binaries compared to the normal stellar population. The X-ray
luminosities (0.3-10 keV) of the resolved LMXBs range from ~5e37 to ~2.5e39
ergs/s. The luminosity function of the LMXBs has a "knee" at 3.2e38 ergs/s,
which is roughly the Eddington luminosity of a 1.4 M_sun neutron star (NS);
this knee might be useful as a distance indicator. The highest luminosity
source has the Eddington luminosity of a ~20 M_sun black hole (BH). The
presence of this large population of NS and massive BH stellar remnants in this
elliptical galaxy shows that it (or its progenitors) once contained a large
population of massive main sequence stars.
