A ROSAT PSPC X-ray survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

Wepresenttheresultsofasystematicsearchfor point-like and moderately extended soft (0:1 2: 4k eV) X-ray sources in a raster of nine pointings covering a eld of 8:95 deg 2 and performed with the ROSAT PSPC between October 1991 and October 1993 in the direc- tion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We detect 248 objects which we include in the rst version of our SMC catalogue of soft X-ray sources. We set up seven source classes dened by selections in the count rate, hardness ratio and source extent. We nd ve high luminosity super-soft sources (1E 0035:4 7230, 1E 0056:8 7146,RX J0048:4 7332,RX J0058:6 7146 and RX J0103 7254), one low-luminosity super-soft source RX J0059:6 7138 correlating with the planetary nebula L357, 51 candidate hard X-ray binaries including eight bright hard X-ray binary candidates, 19 supernova remnants (SNRs), 19 candidate foreground stars and 53 candidatebackgroundactivegalacticnuclei(andquasars). We give a likely classicationfor60% of the catalogued sources. The total count rate of the detected point-like andmoderatelyextendedsourcesinourcatalogueis6.9 0.3 s 1 , comparable to the background subtracted total rate from the integratedeld of6:10:1s 1 .