The XXL Survey: I. Scientific motivations - XMM-Newton observing plan - Follow-up observations and simulation programme

By M. Pierre, F. Pacaud, C. Adami, S. Aliş, B. Altieri, B. Baran, C. Benoist, M. Birkinshaw, A. Bongiorno, M. Bremer and 82 more. 2015

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the XXL Survey, the largest XMM programme totaling some 6.9 Ms to date and involving an international consortium of roughly 100 members. The XXL Survey covers two extragalactic areas of 25 deg2 each at a point-source sensitivity of ~ 5E-15 erg/sec/cm2 in the [0.5-2] keV band (completeness limit). The survey's main goals are to provide constraints on the dark energy equation of state from the space-time distribution of clusters of galaxies and to serve as a pathfinder for future, wide-area X-ray missions. We review science objectives, including cluster studies, AGN evolution, and large-scale structure, that are being conducted with the support of approximately 30 follow-up programmes. We describe the 542 XMM observations along with the associated multi-lambda and numerical simulation programmes. We give a detailed account of the X-ray processing steps and describe innovative tools being developed for the cosmological analysis. The paper provides a thorough evaluation of the X-ray data, including quality controls, photon statistics, exposure and background maps, and sky coverage. Source catalogue construction and multi-lambda associations are briefly described. This material will be the basis for the calculation of the cluster and AGN selection functions, critical elements of the cosmological and science analyses. The XXL multi-lambda data set will have a unique lasting legacy value for cosmological and extragalactic studies and will serve as a calibration resource for future dark energy studies with clusters and other X-ray selected sources. With the present article, we release the XMM XXL photon and smoothed images along with the corresponding exposure maps. The XMM XXL observation list (Table B.1) is available in electronic form at the CDS. The present paper is the first in a series reporting results of the XXL-XMM survey.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9127b2094f487f05d46c15d2271eb8a4567407a4

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Citations in the corpus

• The Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP Survey: Overview and Survey Design (2017, methodology): “In the XMM-LSS region, we also have X-ray data from the XMMLSS survey (Pierre et al. 2016) and Sunyaev-Zel’dovich data from ACTPol (Niemack et al. 2010), which are complementary to optically selected (Oguri et al. 2017a) or weak-lensing selected clusters (Miyazaki et al. 2015; Oguri et al. 2017b)…”
• Universal bolometric corrections for active galactic nuclei over seven luminosity decades (2020, methodology): “Finally, we used a subsample of AGN from the XXL-N survey (Pierre et al. 2016).”