During it's first half year of operations, the ROSAT observatory
carried out the first all-sky survey with an imaging X-ray
telescope between July 1990 and January 1991. Further survey
observations were carried out in February 1991 (2 days) and
August 1991 (10 days).
The whole sky was scanned along great circles
perpendicular to the direction to the Sun. Because of the Earth's
motion around the Sun, the plane of these circles slowly rotated
around an axis through the ecliptic poles, thus covering the whole
sphere within 6 months. Each point of the sky was observed several
times as the scan paths of 2 degrees width (i.e., the field of
view of the PSPC detector) progressed along the ecliptic. Therefore,
the data of any
particular source consist of a number of "snapshots'' of up to 30 s
duration, separated by the orbital period of the satellite ( 90
min) and distributed over an interval of at least 2 days. Towards the
ecliptic poles, the cumulative exposure time increases due to the larger
number of scans covering a particular position. Depending on the ecliptic
latitude (and down-time due to radiation belts of the Earth), the effective
exposure time varies between
s and
s (at the
poles), with typical values of
s on the ecliptic.
Given a typical energy-conversion factor for soft sources of
ergcts-1 cm-2 (cf. Sect. 2.4) the
typical detection limit of RASS observations
(i.e.,
0.015 ctss-1) amounts to
ergcm-2 s-1.
For a more detailed description of the RASS we refer to Voges
(1992) and Belloni et al. (1994). Details of the ROSAT
observatory in general can be found in Trümper (1983) and
Trümper et al. (1991), the PSPC detector used during the RASS
is described by Pfeffermann et al. (1986).
In February 1997 the remaining gaps left in the all sky survey were filled with a sequence of pointed, partially overlapping PSPC observations so that with the exception of a small region around the strong X-ray source Sco X-1 the whole sky has been imaged with the ROSAT PSPC. In the catalog presented in this paper we include sources detected in this "survey repair'' pointed observations; they are marked with an asterisk.
The source detection was performed by means of a maximum
likelihood algorithm (Cruddace et al. 1988) in the course of
the standard analysis software system (SASS; Voges et al.
1992). The significance of an
X-ray source is expressed by the likelihood Li = ,where P is the probability of existence; e.g., a likelihood of
Li = 7 corresponds to a source existence probability of 99.9%.
The result of the SASS
is a comprehensive list of several 104 sources, each source
described by the sky position in right ascension and
declination, its source detection likelihood,
count rate, hardness ratio, extent, and corresponding errors. The data for
the brighter X-ray sources have recently been released as the
ROSAT All-sky Survey Bright Source Catalogue (Voges et al.
1996b), which contains sources with Likelihood
15, count rate
larger than 0.05 s-1, and with at least 15 detected photons.
We used the Bright Star Catalogue (BSC; Hoffleit & Warren 1991) as input sample for our search of X-ray bright late-type stars. In particular, we extracted all stars of spectral types A, F, G, and K and luminosity classes IV and V (including subtypes like IV-V, IVa, but not III-IV). Note that there are no M-type stars in this sample except for the MV star HR 1703, which is obviously a misclassified giant, according to its Hipparcos parallax. We also included those stars lacking an MK classification but with a suffix "d'' or "sg'', and the composite-spectrum stars that do not have one or both companions classified as a giant (these are treated in HSV98). Finally, we included stars of the above mentioned spectral types but without any indication of luminosity (no MK type, no suffix). This also holds for the many Ap-, Am-, Fp- and Fm-stars. Thus in total, our input sample consists of 3054 stars.
One has to keep in mind that because of the large spread in
absolute magnitude of main-sequence stars,
very different space volumes are covered by our magnitude-limited
sample. While A-type stars
are almost completely covered by the BSC up to a distance of
pc, K-types stars are only listed in the BSC if they are
within a few pc from the Sun. This selection effect obviously introduces a
strong bias to any derived X-ray luminosity function.
About 1 percent of the sky was not included in the original RASS, and we
list in Table 1 those stars with less than 50 s exposure time.
Note that the stars HR 813 ( Cet), HR 997, HR 5234, HR 5325, and
HR 5568 were detected in the pointed survey repair observations and are
included in Table 2.
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The procedure whereby the positions of RASS sources were matched with the stars of our input sample has been extensively described in HSV98. Here, we only report that we have accepted sources with a likelihood greater than 7 within 90 arcsec distance from the input stars. The choice of this cut-off radius is justified by means of a Monte Carlo simulation of 10000 random positions, i.e., approximately the same number as our BSC input catalog; see HSV98 for details. That means, at 90 arcseconds offset between optical and X-ray position the probability that the X-ray source can be attributed to the star (and not to a background object) is 50%. This differential probability increases very rapidly for smaller values of positional offset (see Fig. 2 in HSV98).
For about 400 X-ray sources extracted in this way and not included in the Bright Source Catalogue (Voges et al. 1996b), we checked the X-ray images by eye for reality. Specifically, we rejected photon distributions that are significantly contaminated by nearby strong sources or that are obviously extended. In questionable cases, we ran the standard source detection algorithm of EXSAS on the source images in different passbands and decided on the basis of the results which sources to retain in our final catalog.
Confining now attention to the 3054 BSC positions identified with
late-type main-sequence stars and subgiant stars, we
detected X-ray emission from 980 stars, i.e., the average detection
rate is 32%. Since the total search area around these 3054 stars
is 0.0145% of the sphere, and the total number of RASS sources amounts
to
150000, we would expect 21.8 chance coincidences of
late-type main-sequence stars or subgiants with background (or foreground)
X-ray sources (i.e., 2.2% of our detected sources).
The procedure of determining X-ray fluxes has also been
described in HSV98. In this paper, we followed the same
procedure, except using a slightly different formula
for the calculation of individual energy-conversion factors
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Since the SASS source detection was separately performed in both
passbands, and since most of our X-ray sources were detected in both
bands, the hardness ratios can be estimated for many stars, although
in some cases with quite substantial errors. In a few cases, when the
sources were not detected in either the soft or the hard passband,
we set hr = +1.0 or -1.0 by definition, respectively.
We refrain from estimating individual errors for since the error in ECF is very difficult to quantify. In general,
we estimate this error to be within a factor of two for the weaker
sources and less for the brighter sources.
The X-ray luminosities are calculated using the recently available
Hipparcos parallaxes. We only accepted those parallaxes which
exceed their corresponding error by at least a factor of 3.
Fortunately, this is the case for almost all of the input stars.
Where this criterion is not fulfilled, the distance and X-ray
luminosity column entries in Table 2 are left open.
The X-ray luminosities are then calculated by the relation
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