The XMM-Newton serendipitous survey

[Aims]: Pointed observations with XMM-Newton provide the basis for creating catalogues of X-ray sources detected serendipitously in each field. This paper describes the creation and characteristics of the 2XMM catalogue. [Methods]: The 2XMM catalogue has been compiled from a new processing of the XMM-Newton EPIC camera data. The main features of the processing pipeline are described in detail. [Results]: The catalogue, the largest ever made at X-ray wavelengths, contains 246 897 detections drawn from 3491 public XMM-Newton observations over a 7-year interval, which relate to 191 870 unique sources. The catalogue fields cover a sky area of more than 500 deg2. The non-overlapping sky area is ∼360 deg2 (∼1% of the sky) as many regions of the sky are observed more than once by XMM-Newton. The catalogue probes a large sky area at the flux limit where the bulk of the objects that contribute to the X-ray background lie and provides a major resource for generating large, well-defined X-ray selected source samples, studying the X-ray source population and identifying rare object types. The main characteristics of the catalogue are presented, including its photometric and astrometric properties. M. Ceballos, F. Carrera and X. Barcons acknowledge financial support by the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia under projects ESP2003-00812 and ESP2006-13608-C02-01. The French teams are grateful to CNES for supporting this activity. In Germany the XMM-Newton project is supported by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie/Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR) and the Max Planck Society. Part of this work was supported by the DLR project numbers 50 OX 0201, 50 OX 0001, and 50 OG 0502. The Italian team acknowledges financial support from the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), the Ministero dell’ Istruzione, Università e Ricerca (MIUR) and the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) over the last years; they are currently supported by the grant PRIN-MIUR 2006-02-5203 and by the ASI grants n.I/088/06/0 and n.I/023/05/0. UK authors thank STFC for financial support.