2012/03/31 by R. Edelson, Rick Edelson, Matthew A. Malkan +1 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Completeness (order theory) #Cosmology #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Observatory #Quasar #ROSAT #Statistic #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/751/1/52
25 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ; tentatively scheduled for the 2012 May 10 issue. This version contains data from the full WISE release of 13 March 2012, resulting in a W2R sample of 4,316 sources. Tables 3 and 5 can be downloaded from, e.g. http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~malkan/w2r/table3.xls
arxiv created 2012/04/04 · openalex publication_date 2012/05/04 · arxiv updated 2014/09/08 · openalex created_date 2017/12/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We have developed the '' S IX '' statistic to identify bright, highly likely active galactic nucleus (AGN) candidates solely on the basis of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ( WISE ), Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), and ROSAT all-sky survey (RASS) data. This statistic was optimized with data from the preliminary WISE survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and tested with Lick 3 m Kast spectroscopy. We find that sources with S IX < 0 have a ≳95% likelihood of being an AGN (defined in this paper as a Seyfert 1, quasar, or blazar). This statistic was then applied to the full WISE /2MASS/RASS dataset, including the final WISE data release, to yield the ''W2R'' sample of 4316 sources with S IX < 0. Only 2209 of these sources are currently in the Veron–Cetty and Veron (VCV) catalog of spectroscopically confirmed AGNs, indicating that the W2R sample contains nearly 2000 new, relatively bright ( J ≲ 16) AGNs. We utilize the W2R sample to quantify biases and incompleteness in the VCV catalog. We find that it is highly complete for bright ( J < 14), northern AGNs, but the completeness drops below 50% for fainter, southern samples and for sources near the Galactic plane. This approach also led to the spectroscopic identification of 10 new AGNs in the Kepler field, more than doubling the number of AGNs being monitored by Kepler . The W2R sample contains better than 1 bright AGN every 10 deg 2 , permitting construction of AGN samples in any sufficiently large region of sky.