XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre home
News
- 19 July 2010
- The first public release of the XID programme results database at Strasbourg is now available (http://xcatdb.u-strasbg.fr/xidresult/). This initial release contains results from the bright flux, medium flux and galactic plane samples.
- 7 July 2010
- XCat-DB at Strasbourg, containing 2XMMi-DR3, now available. This also provides i) identification probabilities for SDSS DR7, GSC2.2, USNO A-2 / B-1 and 2MASS counterparts and ii) Star/Extragalactic classifications.
- 7 July 2010
- The X-ray source content of the XMM-Newton Galactic Plane Survey (Motch et al., 2010) accepted for publication in A&A (http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0911.0381)
- 28 April 2010
- New incremental catalogue, 2XMMi-DR3, released, containing 353,000 detections, an expansion of 22% on 2XMMi.
- 4 February 2010
- The XMM-Newton Wide Angle Survey (XWAS): the X-ray spectrum of type-1 AGN (Mateos et al. 2010, A&A, 510, 35)
- 2 July 2009
- An intermediate-mass black hole of over 500 solar masses in the galaxy ESO 243-49 (Farrell et al. 2009) published.
- 30 January 2009
- XMM Serendipitous survey: VI. The X-ray Luminosity Function (Ebrero et al. 2009) published
- XMM flux calibration: Statistical evaluation of the flux cross-calibration of the XMM-Newton EPIC cameras (Mateos et al., 2009, A&A, 496, 879) published.
- XMM survey science: An extreme EXO: a type 2 QSO at z = 1.87 (Del Moro et al. 2009) published
- 6 January 2009
- The 2XMM catalogue paper is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics: "The XMM-Newton serendipitous survey. V. The second XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue", M. G. Watson et al., A&A 493, p. 339
SSC overview
Launched in 1999, the XMM-Newton satellite is the major European X-ray observatory class telescope, carrying also a co-aligned UV/optical monitor telescope, that is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). The XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (SSC) has responsibilities within the XMM-Newton project in four main areas:
- The compilation of the XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue.
- The follow-up/identification programme for the XMM-Newton serendipitous X-ray sky survey: the XID Programme
- The pipe-line processing of all XMM-Newton observations.
- The development of science analysis software for XMM-Newton.
In the last 2 tasks the SSC is working closely with the ESA team at the XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre (SOC) based at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Spain.
The SSC represents a consortium of 10 institutes in the ESA community, led by Prof Mike Watson at the University of Leicester and based within the X-ray and Observational Astronomy group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. A full description of the role of the SSC is given in Watson et al. 2001.