SMC X-ray sources ROSAT PSPC catalogue

The catalogue was derived from the pointed ROSAT PSPC observations performed between October 1991 and May 1994 and is complementary to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) catalogue published by Haberl & Pietsch (1999, Cat. <J/A+AS/139/277>). We followed the same identification scheme and used, among other information, X-ray hardness ratios and spatial extent to classify unknown sources as candidates for active galactic nuclei (AGN), foreground stars, supernova remnants (SNRs), supersoft sources (SSSs) and X-ray binaries.

For 158 sources a likely source type is given, from which 46 sources are suggested as background AGN (including candidates resulting from a comparison of X-ray and radio images). Nearly all of the X-ray binaries known in the SMC were detected in ROSAT PSPC observations; most of them with luminosities below 10^36^erg/s suggesting that the fraction of high luminosity X-ray binary systems in the Magellanic Clouds (MCs) is not significantly larger than in our galaxy.