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Description
2XMM is the second comprehensive catalogue of serendipitous X-ray sources from the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton observatory. The catalogue has been constructed by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (SSC) on behalf of ESA. It is the largest X-ray source catalogue ever produced, containing almost twice as many discrete sources as either the ROSAT survey or pointed catalogues. The catalogue contains source detections drawn from 3491 XMM-Newton EPIC observations covering a sky area of about 360 square degrees, made between 2000 February 3 and 2007 March 31; all datasets were publicly available by 2007 May 01 but not all public observations are included in this catalogue. The catalogue contains 246897 X-ray source detections which relate to 191870 unique X-ray sources. The median flux in the total photon energy band (0.2-12keV) of the catalogue detections is about 2.5x10^-14^erg/cm2/s (25aW/m2). About 20% of the sources have total fluxes below 10^-14^erg/cm2/s (10aW/m2). The catalogue in its FITS version file (xmm2cat.fit) has 246897 entries made of 297 columns; a 'slim' version gathering the 39 most relevant columns for the 191870 unique sources detected, is available as an ascii table or a FITS binary table. In both versions, the columns are fully described in the XMM-Newton User Guide available from: http://xmmssc-www.star.le.ac.uk/Catalogue/UserGuide_xmmcat.html The original names of these columns are included in the "Byte-by-byte Description" below (uppercase names within parentheses) Details about the construction of the catalogue can be found from the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (http://xmmssc-www.star.le.ac.uk/)
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