2SXPS: An improved and expanded Swift X-ray telescope point source catalog

Understand

We present the 2SXPS (Swift-XRT Point Source) catalog, containing 206,335 point sources detected by the Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT) in the 0.3--10 keV energy range.

• This catalog represents a significant improvement over 1SXPS, with double the sky coverage (now 3,790 deg$^2$), and several significant developments in source detection and classification.
• In particular, we present for the first time techniques to model the effect of stray light -- significantly reducing the number of spurious sources detected.
• These techniques will be very important for future, large effective area X-ray mission such as the forthcoming Athena X-ray observatory.