P89	February 2004

¹ Institut d'Astrophysique et de Géophysique - Université de Liège, Allée du 6 Août, Bât B5c, B-4000 Liège (Sart Tilman), Belgium
² School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom
³ Universities Space Research Association, 7501 Forbes Blvd, Ste 206, Seabrook, MD 20706, and Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
⁴ Universidad Autonoma del Carmen, Facultad de Ingenieria, Calle 56 No 4, Cd del Carmen, Campeche, Mexico

^* Research Fellow FNRS, Belgium
^** Research Director FNRS, Belgium
^*** Visiting Astronomer, European Southern Observatory

⁺ Based on observations with XMM-Newton, an ESA Science Mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States and the USA (NASA).

Abstract

     We present new XMM-Newton results on the field around the NGC346 star cluster in the SMC. This continues and extends previously published work on Chandra observations of the same field. The two XMM-Newton observations were obtained, respectively, six months before and six months after the previously published Chandra data. Of the 51 X-ray sources detected with XMM-Newton, 29 were already detected with Chandra. Comparing the properties of these X-ray sources in each of our three datasets has enabled us to investigate their variability on times scales of a year. Changes in the flux levels and/or spectral properties were observed for 21 of these sources. In addition, we discovered long-term variations in the X-ray properties of the peculiar system HD5980, a luminous blue variable star, that is likely to be a colliding wind binary system, which displayed the largest luminosity during the first XMM-Newton observation.