|
Description
The authors have obtained a deep 8-field XMM-Newton mosaic of M33 covering the galaxy out to the D<sub>25</sub> isophote and beyond to a limiting 0.2-4.5 keV unabsorbed flux of 5 x 10<sup>-16</sup> erg cm<sup>-2</sup> s<sup>-1</sup> (L > 4 x 10<sup>34</sup> erg s<sup>-1</sup> at the 817 kpc distance of M33). These data allow complete coverage of the galaxy with high sensitivity to soft sources such as diffuse hot gas and supernova remnants (SNRs). In the reference paper, the authors describe the methods they used to identify and characterize 1296 point sources in the 8 fields. They compare their resulting source catalog to the literature, note variable sources, construct hardness ratios, classify soft sources, analyze the source density profile, and measure the X-ray luminosity function (XLF). As a result of the large effective area of XMM-Newton below 1 keV, the survey contains many new soft X-ray sources. The radial source density profile and XLF for the sources suggest that only ~15% of the 391 bright sources with L > 3.6 x 10<sup>35</sup> erg s<sup>-1</sup> are likely to be associated with M33, and more than a third of these are known SNRs. The log(N)-log(S) distribution, when corrected for background contamination, is a relatively flat power law with a differential index of 1.5, which suggests that many of the other M33 sources may be high-mass X-ray binaries. Finally, the authors note the discovery of an interesting new transient X-ray source, which they are unable to classify. The list of XMM-Newton observations used for this survey is given in Table 1 of the reference paper. The data reduction and source detection techniques are described in Section 3 of this same reference. The unabsorbed energy conversion factors (ECF) values for different energy bands and instruments that were used in this paper are as follows (the units are 10<sup>11</sup> counts cm<sup>2</sup> erg<sup>-1</sup>): <pre> HEASARC Energy Band MOS1 MOS2 PN band prefix (keV) Med Filter Med Filter Thin Filter sb0_ 0.2-0.5 0.5009 0.4974 2.7709 sb1_ 0.5-1.0 1.2736 1.2808 6.006 mb_ 1.0-2.0 1.8664 1.8681 5.4819 hb_ 2.0-4.5 0.7266 0.7307 1.9276 fb_ 0.2-4.5 </pre> This table was created by the HEASARC in July 2015 based on an electronic version of Table 3 of the reference paper, the list of XMM-Newton X-ray point sources detected in a deep 8-field mosaic of M33, which was obtained from the ApJS web site. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
|
