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Fornax Dwarf Galaxy XMM-Newton X-Ray Point Source Catalog

Published by High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: September 14, 2025 | Last Modified: 2025-09-10
This table contains some of the results of a deep archive XMM-Newton observation of the Fornax spheroidal galaxy that the authors analyzed with the aim of fully characterizing the X-ray source population (in most of the cases likely to be background active galactic nuclei) detected towards the target. A cross-correlation with the available databases allowed them to find a source that may be associated with a variable star belonging to the galaxy. The authors also searched for X-ray sources in the vicinity of the Fornax globular clusters GC 3 and GC 4 and found two sources probably associated with the respective clusters. The deep X-ray observation was also suitable for the search for the intermediate-mass black hole (of mass ~ 10<sup>4</sup> solar masses) expected to be hosted in the center of the galaxy. In the case of Fornax, this search is extremely difficult since the galaxy centroid of gravity is poorly constrained because of the large asymmetry observed in the optical surface brightness. Since the authors cannot firmly establish the existence of an X-ray counterpart of the putative black hole, they put constraints only on the accretion parameters. In particular, they found that the corresponding upper limit on the accretion efficiency, with respect to the Eddington luminosity, is as low as a few 10<sup>-5</sup>. This table was created by the HEASARC in February 2013 based on an electronic version of Table 1 from the reference paper which was obtained from the A&A web site. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

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