|
Description
NGC 253 is a local, starbursting spiral galaxy with strong X-ray emission from hot gas, as well as many point sources. We have conducted a spectral survey of the X-ray population of NGC 253 using a deep XMM-Newton observation. NGC 253 only accounts for ~20 per cent of the XMM-Newton EPIC field of view, allowing us to identify ~100 X-ray sources that are unlikely to be associated with NGC 253. Hence, we were able to make a direct estimate of contamination from, for example, foreground stars and background galaxies. X-ray luminosity functions (XLFs) of galaxy populations are often used to characterize their properties. There are several methods for estimating the luminosities of X-ray sources with few photons. We have obtained spectral fits for the brightest 140 sources in the 2003 XMM-Newton observation of NGC 253, and compare the best-fitting luminosities of those 69 non-nuclear sources associated with NGC 253 with luminosities derived using other methods. We find the luminosities obtained from these various methods to vary systematically by a factor of up to 3 for the same data; this is largely due to differences in absorption. We therefore conclude that assuming Galactic absorption is probably unwise; rather, one should measure the absorption for the population.
|
