Description
X-ray sources at intermediate fluxes (a few x10^-14^erg/cm^2^/s) with a sky density of ~100deg^-2^ are responsible for a significant fraction of the cosmic X-ray background at various energies below 10keV. The aim of this paper is to provide an unbiased and quantitative description of the X-ray source population at these fluxes and in various X-ray energy bands. We present the XMM-Newton Medium sensitivity Survey (XMS), including a total of 318 X-ray sources found among the serendipitous content of 25 XMM-Newton target fields. The XMS comprises four largely overlapping source samples selected at soft (0.5-2keV), intermediate (0.5-4.5keV), hard (2-10keV) and ultra-hard (4.5-7.5keV) bands, the first three of them being flux-limited.
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