An XMM-Newton observation of the very young open cluster NGC 6383

We report the detection of a number of X-ray sources associated with the very young open cluster NGC 6383. About two thirds of these objects are correlated with a rather faint optical source and all but one have at least one infrared counterpart within a correlation radius of 8 arcsec. Although NGC 6383 is not associated with a prominent star forming region, the overall properties of many of the X-ray sources suggest that they may be candidates for low-mass pre-main sequence stars. The number of X-ray sources increases towards the cluster center suggesting that there exists a close relation between the massive O-star binary system HD 159 176 in the cluster core and the population of X-ray bright low-mass objects in NGC 6383.