XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre home
News
- 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) accepted
- 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
- 18 December 2008
- XMM SSC releases FLIX, the XMM flux upper limit and Image cut-out service
- 03 October 2008
- XMM Medium Sensitivity Survey: Average Fe K alpha emission from distant AGN (Corral et al. 2008) published
- XMM Bright Sensitivity Survey: cosmological properties of AGN in hard X-ray bright sample (Della Ceca et al. 2008) published
- 16 September 2008
- X-ray survey science: High precision X-ray logN-logS distributions: implications for the obscured AGN population (Mateos et al. 2008, accepted to A&A)
- 20 August 2008
- 2XMMi incremental catalogue released, containing 17% more sources than 2XMM.
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.