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3XMM-DR8

The 3XMM-DR8 catalogue contains source detections drawn from 10242 XMM-Newton EPIC observations, covering an energy interval from 0.2 keV to 12 keV. These observations were made between 2000 February 3 and 2017 November 30 and all datasets were publicly available by 2017 December 31, but not all public observations are included in this catalogue (see below for more information).

Should you use the catalogue for your research and publish the results, please use the acknowledgement below and cite the paper describing 3XMM (Rosen, Webb, Watson et al., 2016, A&A, 590, 1).

This research has made use of data obtained from the 3XMM XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue compiled by the 10 institutes of the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre selected by ESA.

As well as the fits and csv formats of the catalogue distributed below, the following Web-based user interfaces will allow filtering and searching of the catalogue (and give access to all or selected associated data products):

The SSC Catalogue Home Page (this page), XSA, and HEASARC allow download of the catalogue file in (binary) FITS. Summary pages and products will be available shortly through LEDAS, but are already available in the IRAP catalogue server.

The cross-correlation products of potential counterparts at other wavelengths for 3XMM-DR8 are provided through the XCAT-DB and the IRAP catalogue server.


The following table gives an overview of the statistics of the catalogue in comparison with the 3XMM-DR7 catalogue.

  3XMM-DR8 3XMM-DR7 Increment
Number of observations 10242 9710 532
Number of 'clean' observations (i.e., observation class < 3) 6496 6164 332
Observing interval 03-Feb-00 -- 30-Nov-17 03-Feb-00 -- 15-Dec-16 1 yr
Sky coverage, taking overlaps into account ( ≥  1ksec exposure) 1089 sq.deg 1032 sq.deg 57 sq.deg
Number of detections 775153 727790 47363
Number of 'clean' detections (i.e., summary flag < 3) 633733 596268 37465
Number of unique sources 531454 499266 32188
Number of 'cleanest' (summary flag = 0, not in high-background fields) extended detections 12256 11220 1036
Number of detections with spectra 173277 162082 11195
Number of detections with timeseries 173208 162045 11163
Number of detections where probability of timeseries being constant is  <  1  × 10-5 5934 5631 303

The median flux in the total photon energy band (0.2 - 12 keV) of the catalogue detections is ~ 2.2 × 10-14 erg cm-2 s-1; in the soft energy band (0.2 - 2 keV) the median flux is ~ 5.2 × 10-15, and in the hard band (2 - 12 keV) it is ~ 1.2 × 10-14. About 23% of the sources have total fluxes below 1 × 10-14 erg cm-2 s-1.

About a fifth 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 (both per source, based on the summary flag column, and per observation, based on the observation class column).


Access

The 3XMM-DR8 catalogue, released on 2018 May 16th, is available in several formats:

Please read the Watchouts section before using the catalogues.

3XMM_DR8cat_v1.0.fits.gz FITS binary 644 MB MD5: 94165bac158af76dd429b58c3fe43dc3 full binary catalogue; recommended for more in-depth studies (includes information of all detections)
3XMM_DR8cat_v1.0.csv.gz CSV 698 MB MD5: 8d4d692315a5f3c8116fd0dcd4044fcf full ascii catalogue
3XMM_DR8cat_slim_v1.0.fits.gz FITS binary 69 MB MD5: 2a53ba575073852bf2c17511aa846eba reduced binary catalogue, suited for studies of unique sources (individual detection information is not included)
3XMM_DR8cat_slim_v1.0.csv.gz CSV 77 MB MD5: 20609a5bce585c215d1aafbab813c51f reduced ascii catalogue

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

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 531454 rows. There are 44 columns, essentially those containing information about the unique sources. The catalogue also contains a column with links to the IRAP catalogue server 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.

A separate file is also provided (table below) which contains key details about the observations used in the construction of the 3XMM-DR8 catalogue. See the list of observations for a description of the columns in the file.

3xmmdr8_obslist.fits FITS binary 1.0 MB MD5: 7ec52f363490927415d3c0a07b737a8e Summary table of observations used in the catalogue

Documentation

The User Guide for the 3XMM-DR8 catalogue contains details of the catalogue production process and content. Here are quick links to


Watchouts

1) Please use SRCID and DETID columns only for the source and detection identification as these are the only columns that will persist in future versions of the catalogue, see the user guide, section 3.2. The usage of IAUNAME is not recommended as its uniqueness is not enforced over the set of unique sources.


Nomenclature and Citation

With the new 3XMM catalogue, IAU name nomenclature includes the designator, 3XMM. The IAU name is provided in the catalogue. The correct, full nomenclature for a specific detection from the catalogues is the IAU name, followed by a colon and the detection identification number, that is:"3XMM Jhhmmss.sSddmmss:detid".

Credits

The production of the 3XMM-DR8 catalogue is a collaborative project involving the whole XMM-Newton SSC Consortium:

The SSC team are grateful to the XMM-Newton SOC for their support in the catalogue production activities.

The SSC acknowledges the use of the TOPCAT and STILTS software packages (written by Mark Taylor, University of Bristol) in the production and testing of the 3XMM-DR8 catalogue.