Overview

This catalog contains ROSAT point sources detected by the standard analysis system SASS. The catalog is based on the public PSPC observations.

Description

During the ROSAT workshop at MPE on October 26, 1994 Wolfgang Voges announced on behalf of the ROSAT Consortium (MPE-Garching, GSFC/SAO-US, and WFC-Consortium-UK) the public release of "THE FIRST ROSAT SOURCE CATALOGUE OF POINTED OBSERVATIONS WITH THE PSPC". This catalogue contains 50,408 sources from 2876 pointed observations. For each source the following properties are provided: the observation number, the ROSAT name, the position in equatorial and in galactic co-ordinates, four positional errors (intrinsic, systematic, boresight, and total), the source count-rate and its error, the background countrate, exposure time, hardness-ratios HR1 and HR2 and their errors, extent and likelihood of extent, likelihoods of the map-detect algorithm and of the maximum-likelihood detection algorithm, flags to indicate in which energy band and by what algorithm the source was detected, the detection cell size, the off-axis radius, the distances to the nearest rib and source (before and after removal of ambiguous sources), and a source confusion flag (set if another source is within 2.1*FWHM of the point-spread function).

This catalogue contains observations which have been performed until the end of May 1993 and which are in the public archive. A visual inspection of all soft and hard images, and an automated screening process on the original so called master source lists (MASOL), have been used to remove confused sources and 124 observations with too crowded regions and regions of high surface brightness diffuse emission. The resulting 50,408 sources have a likelihood of at least 10, corresponding to a rate of accidental detections of about 1 percent. This data base contains 80% of all PSPC observations. Since the acceptance criteria were rather conservative a total number of about 70,000 X-ray sources detected during the pointed PSPC observation phase can be expected.


Parameters

NAME
ROSAT source name.
ALTERNATE_NAME
Alternate source name if given.
RA
Source right ascension
DEC
Source declination
LII
Source galactic longitude
BII
Source galactic lattitude
SEQUENCE
ROSAT observation sequence number
ML_INDEX
MASOL main running number
ERROR_ML
Positional accuracy: error radius of Maximum Likelihood algorithm (arcsec)
ERROR_BOR
Positional accuracy: boresight error
ERROR_SYS
Positional accuracy: systematic error
ERROR_RADIUS
Positional accuracy: total error
OFFAXIS
Off-axis radius in arcmin
COUNTRATE
Source counts per second (vignetting corrected)
ECOUNTS
Error on countrate
BACKGROUND
Background counts/sec/square arcmin
EXPOSURE
Exposure time in seconds (vignetting corrected)
HARDNESS1
Hardness ratio 1. Defined as (B-A)/(B+A).
EHARDNESS1
Error on hardness1.
HARDNESS2
Hardness ratio 2. Defined as (D-C)/(D+C).
EHARDNESS2
Error on hardness2.
EXTENT
Extent size in arcsec.
EXTENTLIK
Extent likelihood.
ML_LIKE
Likelihood from maximum-likelihood method
MD_LIKE
Likelihood of M-Detect algorithm.
RIBDIST
Distance to next rib or edge in arcsec
SRCDIST
Distance to next source in arcsec before screening
SRCCDIST
Distance to next source in arcsec after screening
PRIORITY
Source detection string. Each character describes the detection/non-detection
in each of the different energy bands in the following order:
   detection flag in MDetect broad band
   detection flag in LDetect broad band
   detection flag in MDetect hard band
   detection flag in LDetect hard band
   detection flag in MDetect soft band
   detection flag in LDetect soft band
   detection flag (broad=b,....)
CELL
Detect cell size.
VIGNETTING
Vignetting correction factor.
CONFUSION
Confusion indicator.
CLASS
Browse classification

Contact Person

Questions regarding the ROSATSRC database table can be addressed to the HEASARC User Hotline.
Page Author: Browse Software Development Team
Last Modified: Thursday, 18-Jul-2002 12:56:04 EDT