Welcome to the XMM Catalogue public pages

    We are pleased to announce the Incremental Second XMM-Newton Serendipitous Source Catalogue 2XMMi.

    2XMMi is the incremental second catalogue of serendipitous X-ray sources from the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton observatory. The catalogue has been constructed by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (SSC) on behalf of ESA.

The 2XMMi catalogue has about 17% new detections as compared to the 2XMM catalogue and is the largest X-ray source catalogue ever produced, containing more than twice as many discrete sources as either the ROSAT survey or pointed catalogues. 2XMMi complements deeper Chandra and XMM-Newton small area surveys, probing a much larger sky area.

The catalogue provides an effective dataset for generating large, well-defined samples of various types of astrophysical object, notably active galaxies (AGN), clusters of galaxies, interacting compact binaries and active stellar coronae, using the power of X-ray selection. The large sky area covered by the serendipitous survey also means that 2XMMi is a rich resource for exploring the variety of the X-ray source populations and identifying rare source types.

The catalogue contains source detections drawn from 4117 XMM-Newton EPIC observations made between 2000 February 3 and 2008 March 28; all datasets were publicly available by 2008 May 01 but not all public observations are included in this catalogue. The catalogue contains 289083 X-ray source detections which relate to 221012 unique X-ray sources (covering an energy interval from 0.2 keV to 12 keV). About half of the observations have features that may cause spurious detections (mainly the wings of bright sources and large extended emission), and it is strongly recommended to use a filter (either per source or per observation). For ~90% of all observations the target name could be identified via Simbad or NED and their field content (with respect to serendipitous sources) could be identified. The following table gives an overview of the statistics of the catalogue in comparison with the 2XMM catalogue which was published in August 2007.

Note: A new version (1.1) of the 2XMMi catalogue was released on 15 April 2010. This version includes important corrections to two columns relating to the EPIC band 4 fluxes for detections and unique sources. Please see here for details.

The median flux in the total photon energy band (0.2 - 12 keV) of the catalogue detections is ~ 2.5 × 10^-14 erg cm^-2 s^-1; in the soft energy band (0.2 - 2 keV) the median flux is ~ 5.8 × 10^-15, and in the hard band (2 - 12 keV) it is ~ 1.4 × 10^-14. About 20% of the sources have total fluxes below 1 × 10^-14 erg cm^-2 s^-1.

Access

The 2XMMi catalogue, released on 2008 August 20^th, is available in several formats:

For convenience, there are suitable SQL CREATE statements available for use with a relational DBMS in order to load the data in CSV format:

• load2XMMicat_v1.1.sql
• load_2XMMicat_slim_v1.0.sql

The CSV file has nulls represented by two successive commas, compatible with Postgres and (probably) other DBMS.

The slimline version of the catalogue contains one row per unique source (while the the main catalogue has one row per detection) and thus has 221012 rows. There are 37 columns, essentially those containing information about the unique sources. The catalogue also contains a column with links to the LEDAS summary pages. In the case of sources with multiple detections the summary page of the best detection is selected (i.e., the detection with the largest exposure time, summed over all cameras), and the summary page gives cross-links to the other detections.

Two separate files are also provided (table below) which contain key details about the observations used in the construction of the 2XMMi catalogue and information about the targets of the observations. See the list of observations and the list of target identifications for descriptions of the columns in each file. Note that in version 1.1 of the catalogue these files were contained in separate extensions of the full fits catalogue

The following Web-based user interfaces will allow filtering and searching of the catalogue (and give access to all or selected associated data products):

• XSA at ESA's XMM-Newton SOC
• LEDAS at the SSC institute, University of Leicester
• XCAT-DB at the SSC institute, OA Strasbourg
• Browse or Browse 2XMMi at HEASARC NASA GSFC
• VizieR at CDS Strasbourg (slim catalogue)

The SSC Catalogue Home Page (this page), XSA, and HEASARC allow download of the catalogue file in (binary) FITS.

Documentation

The User Guide for the 2XMMi catalogue contains details of the catalogue production process and content. Here are quick links to

• the description of the columns in the catalogue,
• the list of observations used to compile the catalogue,
• the list of target identifications of the observations in the catalogue,
• the table of energy bands used for the catalogue.

Nomenclature and Citation

Depending on whether a source has an existing entry in the 2XMM catalogue or is new in the 2XMMi catalogue, the correct nomenclature for references to sources in the catalogue is the name starting with the '2XMM' or '2XMMi' designator respectively, as included in the IAUNAME column of the catalogue itself, followed by a colon and the detection identification number where a specific detection is referred to (rather than the source itself), that is: "2XMM Jhhmmss.sSddmmss:detid" or "2XMMi Jhhmmss.sSddmmss:detid".

The production and content of the 2XMM catalogue is described in detail in "The XMM-Newton serendipitous survey. V. The second XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue", M. G. Watson et al., A&A 493, p. 339 Note that there are no differences in the processing between the 2XMM and 2XMMi observations.

Credits

The production of the 2XMMi catalogue is a collaborative project involving the whole SSC Consortium:

• University of Leicester, UK
• Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, UK
• Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK
• Max-Planck Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Germany
• Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, Germany
• Service d'Astrophysique, CEA/DSM/DAPNIA, Saclay, France
• Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, Toulouse, France
• Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France
• Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria, Santander, Spain
• Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Milan, Italy

Last Updated: 18-Nov-2008