Credit: University of Leicester (M. Watson)
Cataloguing A Piece of the Universe
The XMM-Newton observatory, launched on December 10 1999, is one of the workhorses of modern X-ray astronomy. In over seven years of operation XMM-Newton has viewed a large portion of the sky to depths not seen with other X-ray observatories. Now the XMM-Newton project has catalogued all the sources seen by XMM-Newton during its lifetime so far. This catalog, called "2XMM", is the largest catalog of X-ray sources ever assembled. The catalog covers 360 square degrees of the sky and contains 247,000 X-ray source detections of 192,000 unique X-ray sources. The image above compares the sensitivity and area covered by 2XMM to other important recent X-ray surveys. X-ray astrophysicists will use this unique resource to determine the gross properties of large catagories of X-ray sources.
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 26-Feb-2024 17:37:02 EST
