Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2000-11-13
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
to appear in the XMM-Newton special issue of A&A (Vol 365, January 2001). High-resolution versions of fig. 1 and fig. 6 availa
Scientific paper
10.1051/0004-6361:20000243
We present the results of a study based on an XMM-Newton Performance Verification observation of the central 30 arcmin of the nearby spiral galaxy M31. In the 34-ks European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) exposure, we detect 116 sources down to a limiting luminosity of 6 x 10^35 erg/s (0.3--12 keV, d = 760 kpc). The luminosity distribution of the sources detected with XMM-Newton flattens at luminosities below ~ 2.5 x 10^37 erg/s. We make use of hardness ratios for the detected sources in order to distinguish between classes of objects such as super-soft sources and intrinsically hard or highly absorbed sources. We demonstrate that the spectrum of the unresolved emission in the bulge of M31 contains a soft excess which can be fitted with a ~ 0.35-keV optically-thin thermal-plasma component clearly distinct from the composite point-source spectrum. We suggest that this may represent diffuse gas in the centre of M31, and we illustrate its extent in a wavelet-deconvolved image.
Borozdin Konstantin
Guainazzi Matteo
Hayter C.
La Palombara Nicola
Mason Keith O.
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