A catalog of galaxy clusters observed by XMM-Newton^*

¹ Code 662, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA e-mail: steven.l.snowden@nasa.gov
² Code 662, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA e-mail: richard.f.mushotzky@nasa.gov
³ Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA e-mail: kuntz@pha.jhu.edu
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
⁵ CRESST and the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory, NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA e-mail: david.s.davis@nasa.gov

Received: 22 May 2007
Accepted: 3 October 2007

Abstract

Aims.We present a uniform catalog of the images and radial profiles of the temperature, abundance, and brightness for 70 clusters of galaxies observed by XMM-Newton.

Methods.We use a new “first principles” approach to the modeling and removal of the background components; the quiescent particle background, the cosmic diffuse emission, the soft proton contamination, and the solar wind charge exchange emission. Each of the background components demonstrate significant spectral variability, several have spatial distributions that are not described by the photon vignetting function, and all except for the cosmic diffuse emission are temporally variable. Because these backgrounds strongly affect the analysis of low surface brightness objects, we provide a detailed description our methods of identification, characterization, and removal.

Results.We have applied these methods to a large collection of XMM-Newton observations of clusters of galaxies and present the resulting catalog. We find significant systematic differences between the Chandra and XMM-Newton temperatures.