News 20180516 - XMM-Newton

XMM-Newton-NEWS

Contents:

• XSA v10.0 release including access to the 3XMM (DR8) Catalogue
• Release of the new version the XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue: 3XMM (DR8) and new outreach pages

XSA v10.0 release including access to the 3XMM (DR8) Catalogue

A new version of the XMM-Newton Science Archive (XSA v10.0) is available at

There are two main changes in this version: it provides access to the incremental version of the 3XMM Catalogue (DR8, see next item in this newsletter) and it uses a new image viewer for the interactive data analysis functionality (done via the Remote Interface for Science Analysis, RISA, as announced in Newsletter#198). The new image viewer is JS9 replacing DS9 and integrated in the web browser, making its usage more straightforward. In addition, the new XSA version contains now the Radiation Monitor files and allows select and download of these data.

Release of the new version the XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue: 3XMM (DR8) and new outreach pages

A new version of the XMM-Newton EPIC Serendipitous Source Catalogue, 3XMM-DR8, has been released. The catalogue includes an extra year of data with respect to 3XMM-DR7, with 775153 X-ray detections which relate to 531454 unique X-ray sources from 10242 observations that were public by the 31^st December 2017. 3XMM-DR8 covers a total sky area, with at least 1 ks exposure, of ~1089 square degrees if overlaps are taken into account, where some regions of the sky have been pointed as many as 59 times. 3XMM-DR8 is an increase of approximately 7% in terms of unique sources compared with 3XMM-DR7, that was released in June 2017. Around 9% 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 1.6 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 band, respectively.

The creation of the 3XMM Catalogue is a joint venture carried out by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (XMM-SSC) 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 on the XMM-SSC webpages 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

This catalogue, along with the other catalogues produced in the framework of ESA's XMM-Newton mission, will be presented at the workshop 'Treasures hidden in high energy catalogues' that will take place at IRAP, Toulouse, France, from the 22^nd to the 24^th May 2018. Please see the website for further details

With the release of the 3XMM-DR8 catalogue XMM-SSC also releases new webpages aimed at the general public of all generations. These pages are a complement to the existing webpages, and can be found at

Yours sincerely,

XMM-Newton SOC