We observed the main core F of the \rho Ophiuchi cloud , an active star-forming region located at d \sim 140 pc , using XMM-Newton with an exposure of 33 ks .
We detect 87 X-ray sources within the 30 \arcmin diameter field-of-view of the EPIC imaging detector array .
We cross-correlate the positions of XMM-Newton X-ray sources with previous X-ray and infrared ( IR ) catalogs : 25 previously unknown X-ray sources are found from our observation ; 43 X-ray sources are detected by both XMM-Newton and Chandra ; 68 XMM-Newton X-ray sources have 2MASS near-IR counterparts .
We show that XMM-Newton and Chandra have comparable sensitivity for point source detection when the exposure time is set to \sim 30 ks for both .
We detect X-ray emission from 7 Class I sources , 26 Class II sources , and 17 Class III sources .
The X-ray detection rate of Class I sources is very high ( 64 % ) , which is consistent with previous Chandra observations in this area .
We propose that 15 X-ray sources are new class III candidates , which doubles the number of known Class III sources , and helps to complete the census of YSOs in this area .
We also detect X-ray emission from two young bona fide brown dwarfs , GY310 and GY141 , out of three known in the field of view .
GY141 appears brighter by nearly two orders of magnitude than in the Chandra observation .
We extract X-ray light curves and spectra from these YSOs , and find some of them showed weak X-ray flares .
We observed an X-ray flare from the bona fide brown dwarf GY310 .
We find as in the previous Chandra observation of this region that Class I sources tend to have higher temperatures and heavier X-ray absorptions than Class II and III sources .