Date Presented:

2006/01/1

Abstract:

As shown in our first poster, in a recent survey of M33 with XMM-Newton we detected the X-ray source population of this nearby spiral galaxy down to the (0.2-4.5) keV luminosity of 10³⁵ erg s^-1, a factor of 10 deeper than in previous observations. The majority of the detected sources was classified using, in many cases, only their X-ray properties. In particular, 8 new X-ray binary (XRB) candidates were selected, based on their long-term X-ray light curves. We also classified supernova remnants (SNRs), super-soft sources (SSS), AGN, foreground stars and a population of ‘hard’ sources using the hardness ratio (HR) method. A detailed spectral and timing analysis of the brightest sources is in progress. We present a few examples of spectra for particular source classes. We find that bright ‘hard’ sources can be divided into two broad families: one best modelled by a powerlaw with photon index in the range of 1.0-2.0, and the other displaying disk blackbody spectra with kT of 0.8 to 1.5 keV.

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