News 20170601 - XMM-Newton

XMM-Newton-NEWS

Contents:

• XSA v9.5 release with access to the 3XMM (DR7) Catalogue
• Release of the new version of the XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue: 3XMM (DR7)

XSA v9.5 release with access to the 3XMM (DR7) Catalogue

A new version of the XMM-Newton Science Archive (XSA v9.5) is available at

It includes, among other improvements, access to the incremental version of the 3XMM catalogue (DR7):

New version of the XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue: 3XMM (DR7)

A new version of the XMM-Newton EPIC Serendipitous Source Catalogue, 3XMM-DR7, has been released. The catalogue includes an extra year of data with respect to 3XMM-DR6, with 727790 detections which relate to 499266 unique sources from 9710 observations that were public by the 31^st December 2016. 3XMM-DR7 covers a total sky area, with at least 1 ks exposure, of ~1032 square degrees if overlaps are taken into account, where some regions of the sky have been pointed as many as 59 times. 3XMM-DR7 represents an increase of approximately 7% in terms of unique sources compared with 3XMM-DR6, that was released in July 2016. Around 12% of all the detections are classified as extended, and spectra and time series have been extracted for around 22% of the sources. The median positional uncertainty of the catalogue detections is 1.7 arcseconds (with a standard deviation of 1.39) and the astrometric quality of 3XMM is improved with respect to prior releases. Median sensitivities in the catalogue are ~6E-15 and ~8E-15 erg/cm²/s in the soft (0.2-2 keV) and hard (2-12 keV) X-ray bands, respectively.

The creation of the 3XMM catalogue is a joint venture carried out by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre Consortium. The catalogue is described in the paper Rosen, Webb, Watson et al. 2016, A&A, 590, 1. Details of the catalogue, the catalogue files and full 3XMM documentation are available at

FITS files containing summary information about the observations used in the catalogue are also provided. FITS and CSV versions of the full 3XMM catalogue and a slimline version of the FITS file are also available for download at

The slimline version has only one row per unique source (rather than per detection as in the main catalogue) and a reduced number of columns that essentially pertain to the unique source quantities.

Alongside the XSA user interface, 3XMM is also distributed through:

Yours sincerely,

XMM-Newton SOC