1 Introduction

Since the Magellanic Clouds (MCs) are among the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, we are able to study their overall characteristics such as source distribution as well as properties of single objects within the galaxies. Complementary to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) source catalogue of the ROSAT High Resolution Imager (HRI) published by Sasaki et al. (hereafter SHP00) HRI data of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) region is analyzed in the work presented here. The SMC with a distance of $\sim$60kpc has been subject to many studies in different wavelength bands (e.g. Davies et al. 1976; Kennicutt & Hodge 1986; Staveley-Smith et al. 1997).

X-ray emission from the MCs was first observed in a rocket mission in 1970 (Price et al. 1971). The first discovered single X-ray source in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) was SMC X-1 detected in an Uhuru observation (Leong et al. 1971). The Einstein Observatory performed several X-ray observations of the SMC making a thorough survey (Seward & Mitchell 1981; Inoue et al. 1983; Bruhweiler et al. 1987; Wang & Wu 1992). Pointed observations by the X-ray satellite ROSAT (Trümper 1982) covered the MCs in the energy range of 0.1 - 2.4 keV. Kahabka et al. (1999, hereafter KPFH99) presented the first ROSAT PSPC source catalogue of the SMC. After analyzing all the available PSPC pointings Haberl et al. (2000, hereafter HFPK00) published a ROSAT PSPC catalogue of discrete sources in the SMC containing 517 X-ray sources.