| Description |
The XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has performed a survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud comprising of 30 fields covering 5.5 square degrees, totalling 1.1 Ms of observations. The survey has been supplemented by 61 archival observations, totalling 1.6 Ms. The actual exposure time is distributed inhomogeneously over the SMC, with two thirds of the fields having 10-30 ks exposures, while some fields have up to 400-600 Ks deep exposures. Initial investigations of our point-source catalogue, comprising 3053 sources, shows that it is complete down to a limiting flux of about 1E-14 erg/s/cm^2, which corresponds to a luminosity limit of 4E33 erg/s. This survey provides a unique data set to investigate the X-ray source populations of the SMC, in particular its remarkably large population – in comparison to the Milky Way - of Be/X-ray binaries. In addition, a number of new super-soft X-ray sources and supernova remnants have been identified. However, the vast majority (~90%) of sources from the survey are likely to be background AGN. A handfull of galaxy clusters have also been detected. The census of the SMC source population amounts to 339 objects, for which about half have a confirmed, or very likely, optical counterpart, and most of the rest have tentative classifications based on their X-ray colours and other information. Some initial results and plans for future ground-based followup observations of new SNR candidates with SALT and other facilities will also be discussed, plus some observational results on HMXBs.
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