A deep ROSAT survey — XII. The X-ray spectra of faint ROSAT sources

Abstract

Optical spectroscopy has enabled us to identify the optical counterparts to over 200 faint X-ray sources to a flux limit of S_(0.5-2keV)=4x10^-15 erg s^-1 cm^-2 on 5 deep ROSAT fields. Here we present a spectral analysis of all the X-ray sources to investigate claims that the average source spectra harden at faint X-ray flux. From a hardness ratio analysis we confirm that the average spectra from 0.5-2 keV harden from an equivalent photon index of $\Gamma=2.2$ at S_(0.5-2keV)=1x10^-13 erg s^-1 cm^-2 to $\Gamma=1.7$ below 1x10^-14 erg s^-1 cm^-2. These spectral changes are due to the emergence of an unidentified source population rather than the class of X-ray QSOs already identified. The 128 QSOs detected so far show no evidence for spectral hardening over this energy range and retain a mean photon index of $\Gamma=2.2$. Recent work suggests that many of the remaining unidentified sources are X-ray luminous galaxies. Taking a subset identified as the most likely galaxy candidates we find that these show significantly harder spectra than QSOs. The emission line galaxies in particular show spectra more consistent with the residual X-ray background, with $\Gamma=1.51 \pm 0.1$ from 0.1-2 keV. Individually the galaxies appear to be a mixture of absorbed and unabsorbed X-ray sources. Combined with recent cross-correlation results and work on the source number count distribution, these results suggest that we may be uncovering the missing hard component of the cosmic X-ray background.