The Southern SHARC Catalogue: a ROSAT survey for distant galaxy clusters

Abstract

X-ray selection provides a way of creating well-defined samples of distant clusters free from projection effects and with a well-understood selection function. This paper (Burke et al. 2003) describes the creation of one such catalogue - the Southern Serendipitous High-redshift Archival ROSAT Cluster (SHARC) survey - which covers an area of 17.7 deg² and consists of 32 clusters with redshifts between 0.05 and 0.7 and X-ray luminosities between 7 x 10⁴² and 4 x 10⁴⁴ erg/s: the high-redshift subsample contains 16 clusters with z >= 0.3 and X-ray luminosities greater than 2 x 10⁴³ erg/s (luminosities are quoted for the 0.5 - 2.0 keV energy band). The catalogue is in good agreement with those of other ROSAT cluster surveys for those fields in common. The high-redshift sample is consistent with there being no evolution in the cluster XLF at luminosities ~ 10⁴⁴ erg/s: the implications of this work have been described elsewhere (Burke et al. 1997; Collins et al. 1997).

Data Files:

Data from the Southern SHARC survey is available in machine-readable form following the conventions used by the VizieR Catalogue Service. They can also be downloaded from the CDS ftp site or browsed using the VizieR interface. The VizieR catalog name for the table containing the details on the clusters is J/MNRAS/341/1093/clusters).

• ReadMe
• clusters.dat
• selfn.dat
• fields.dat
• extsrcs.dat
• numflux.dat