The XMM-Newton serendipitous survey IX. The fourth XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue

Abstract

Context. Sky surveys produce enormous quantities of data on extensive regions of the sky. The easiest way to access this information is through catalogues of standardised data products. XMM-Newton has been surveying the sky in the X-ray, ultra-violet, and optical bands for 20 years. Aims. The XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre has been producing standardised data products and catalogues to facilitate access to the serendipitous X-ray sky. Methods. Using improved calibration and enhanced software, we re-reduced all of the 14 041 XMM-Newton X-ray observations, of which 11 204 observations contained data with at least one detection and with these we created a new, high quality version of the XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue, 4XMM-DR9. Results. 4XMM-DR9 contains 810 795 detections down to a detection significance of 3σ, of which 550 124 are unique sources, which cover 1152 degrees² (2.85%) of the sky. Filtering 4XMM-DR9 to retain only the cleanest sources with at least a 5σ detection significance leaves 433 612 detections. Of these detections, 99.6% have no pileup. Furthermore, 336 columns of information on each detection are provided, along with images. The quality of the source detection is shown to have improved significantly with respect to previous versions of the catalogues. Spectra and lightcurves are also made available for more than 288 000 of the brightest sources (36% of all detections).