A multimission catalogue of ultraluminous X-ray source candidates

Creators: Walton, D. J.; Mackenzie, A. D. A.; Gully, H.; Patel, N. R.; Roberts, T. P.; Earnshaw, H. P.; Mateos, S.

Abstract

We present a new, multimission catalogue of ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) candidates, based on recent data releases from each of the XMM–Newton, Swift, and Chandra observatories (the 4XMM-DR10, 2SXPS, and CSC2 catalogues, respectively). This has been compiled by cross-correlating each of these X-ray archives with a large sample of galaxies primarily drawn from the HyperLEDA archive. Significant efforts have been made to clean the sample of known non-ULX contaminants (e.g. foreground stars, background active galactic nuclei, supernovae), and also to identify ULX candidates that are common to the different X-ray catalogues utilized, allowing us to produce a combined 'master' list of unique sources. Our sample contains 1843 ULX candidates associated with 951 different host galaxies, making it the largest ULX catalogue compiled to date. Of these, 689 sources are catalogued as ULX candidates for the first time. Our primary motivation is to identify new sources of interest for detailed follow-up studies, and within our catalogue we have already found one new extreme ULX candidate that has high S/N data in the archive: NGC 3044 ULX1. This source has a peak luminosity of L_(X,peak) ∼ 10⁴⁰ erg s⁻¹, and the XMM–Newton spectrum of the source while at this peak flux is very similar to other, better-studied extreme ULXs that are now understood to be local examples of super-Eddington accretion. This likely indicates that NGC 3044 ULX1 is another source accreting at super-Eddington rates. We expect that this catalogue will be a valuable resource for planning future observations of ULXs – both with our current and future X-ray facilities – to further improve our understanding of this enigmatic population.

Additional Information

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Accepted 2021 October 14. Received 2021 October 8; in original form 2021 September 1. Published: 20 October 2021. The authors would like to thank the referee for taking the time to review our work. DJW acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) via an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship (ST/N004027/1). TPR also acknowledges support from STFC via consolidated grant ST/000244/1. SM acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry MCIU under project RTI2018-096686-B-C21 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER/UE), cofunded by FEDER funds and from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Unidad de Excelencia Marìa de Maeztu, ref. MDM-2017-0765. This research has made use of data obtained with XMM–Newton, an ESA science mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States, as well as public data from the Swift data archive. This work has also made use of data obtained from the Chandra Source Catalogue, provided by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) as part of the Chandra Data Archive, as well as public data from the Swift data archive. This paper made use of the Whole Sky Database (WSDB) created by Sergey Koposov and maintained at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge by Sergey Koposov, Vasily Belokurov, and Wyn Evans with financial support from STFC and the European Research Council (ERC), as well as the Q3C software (Koposov & Bartunov 2006). This research has also made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology, as well as the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and we further acknowledge usage of the HyperLEDA data base. Data Availability: All of the raw data underlying this article are publicly available from ESA's XMM–Newton Science Archive,4 NASA's HEASARC data base5 and NASA's Chandra Data Archive.6 The primary X-ray catalogues (4XMM,7 2SXPS,8 and CSC29), galaxy catalogues (HyperLEDA,10 CNG,11 and Cosmicflows12), and general catalogues (NED13 and SIMBAD14) used in this work are also all publicly available via the links provided. The final catalogues of ULX candidates produced here will also be made publicly available via the VizieR archive15 after the publication of this work.

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