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

¹ Astronomical Institute, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
² Center for High Energy Astrophysics, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
³ Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, D-85740 Garching bei München, Germany
⁴ University of Western Sydney, Nepean, P.O. Box 10, Kingswood NSW 2747, Australia
⁵ Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO, P.O. Box 76, Epping NSW 2121, Australia

Received: 25 May 1998
Accepted: 7 December 1998

Abstract

We present the results of a systematic search for point-like and moderately extended soft (0.1-2.4 keV) sources in a raster of nine pointings covering a field of and performed with the ROSAT  PSPC between October 1991 and October 1993 in the direction of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We detect 248 objects which we include in the first version of our SMC catalogue of soft X-ray sources. We set up seven source classes defined by selections in the count rate, hardness ratio and source extent. We find five 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 binary candidates, 19 supernova remnants (SNRs), 19 candidate foreground stars and 53 candidate background active galactic nuclei (and quasars). We give a likely classification for ~60% of the catalogued sources. The total count rate of the detected point-like and moderately extended sources in our catalogue is 6.9 ± 0.3 s^-1, comparable to the background subtracted total rate from the integrated field of s^-1.