A ROSAT PSPC catalogue of X-ray sources in the SMC region

We present a catalogue of 517 discrete X-ray sources in a 6 degrees x6 degrees field covering the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The catalogue was derived from the pointed ROSAT PSPC observations performed between October 1991 and May 1994 and is complementary to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) catalogue published by Haberl & Pietsch (1999). We followed the same identification scheme and used, among other information, X-ray hardness ratios and spatial extent to classify unknown sources as candidates for active galactic nuclei (AGN), foreground stars, supernova remnants (SNRs), supersoft sources (SSSs) and X-ray binaries. For 158 sources a likely source type is given, from which 46 sources are suggested as background AGN (including candidates resulting from a comparison of X-ray and radio images). Nearly all of the X-ray binaries known in the SMC were detected in ROSAT PSPC observations; most of them with luminosities below 10(36) erg s(-1) suggesting that the fraction of high luminosity X-ray binary systems in the Magellanic Clouds (MCs) is not significantly larger than in our galaxy. Seventeen X-ray sources are associated with SNRs found in earlier work and we suggest here two additional extended sources as SNR candidates. Three very soft sources are newly classified as SSSs from which one is identified with the symbiotic star LIN 358 in the SMC.