MID-INFRARED SELECTION OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI WITH THE WIDE-FIELD INFRARED SURVEY EXPLORER. I. CHARACTERIZING WISE-SELECTED ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI IN COSMOS

By Daniel Stern, R. Assef, Dominic J. Benford, A. Blain, R. Cutri, A. Dey, Peter Eisenhardt, R. Griffith, Thomas H. Jarrett, S. Lake and 8 more. 2012

465 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is an extremely capable and efficient black hole finder. We present a simple mid-infrared color criterion, W1 − W2 ⩾ 0.8 (i.e., [3.4]−[4.6] ⩾0.8, Vega), which identifies 61.9 ± 5.4 active galactic nucleus (AGN) candidates per deg2 to a depth of W2 ∼ 15.0. This implies a much larger census of luminous AGNs than found by typical wide-area surveys, attributable to the fact that mid-infrared selection identifies both unobscured (type 1) and obscured (type 2) AGNs. Optical and soft X-ray surveys alone are highly biased toward only unobscured AGNs, while this simple WISE selection likely identifies even heavily obscured, Compton-thick AGNs. Using deep, public data in the COSMOS field, we explore the properties of WISE-selected AGN candidates. At the mid-infrared depth considered, 160 μJy at 4.6 μm, this simple criterion identifies 78% of Spitzer mid-infrared AGN candidates according to the criteria of Stern et al. and the reliability is 95%. We explore the demographics, multiwavelength properties and redshift distribution of WISE-selected AGN candidates in the COSMOS field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42e9a7b38e56862e45dbac4248ae98a48fbb00c8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

CHARACTERIZING THE MID-INFRARED EXTRAGALACTIC SKY WITH WISE AND SDSS (2012, methodology): “The selection of W1−W2 method, briefly discussed in Jarrett et al. (2011), is tested and discussed in detail in Stern et al. (2012) and Assef et al. (2012) (see also Ashby et al. 2009; Assef et al. 2010; Eckart et al. 2010; Edelson & Malkan 2012; Massaro et al. 2012; Wu et al. 2012; Mateos et al.…”
IDENTIFICATION OF 1.4 MILLION ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI IN THE MID-INFRARED USING WISE DATA (2015, methodology): “For picking out Spitzer IRAC-selected AGNs down to a limiting magnitude of W2 < 15, the WISE one-color AGN selection criteria of Stern et al. (2012) and Assef et al. (2013) are both very reliable, with 95% and and > 90% reliability, respectively.”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA (2015, background): “Colors between optical and WISE passbands can be used to distinguish quasars from stellar objects characterized by blackbody spectra (for example Stern et al. 2012).”
THE SDSS-III BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: THE QUASAR LUMINOSITY FUNCTION FROM DATA RELEASE NINE (2012, methodology): “21.5 (23.0), broadly consistent with the value of 99±4 quasars deg−2 with gdered < 22.5 from Palanque-Delabrouille et al. (2012, their Table 5) and a surface density similar to that selected by a shallow midinfrared selection (Stern et al. 2012; Yan et al. 2012).”
The WISE AGN Catalog (2017, methodology): “Adopting a photometric limit of W2 ≤ 15.05, roughly corresponding to the 10σ threshold at the shallowest regions of the WISE survey (Stern et al. 2012), reduces the sample of triplets to the four 2RXS sources listed in Table 6.”
GALAXY AND MASS ASSEMBLY (GAMA): MID-INFRARED PROPERTIES AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS FROM WISE (2014, methodology): “…February 20 Cluver et al. (A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.) diagnostic is therefore useful to separate galaxy populations, particularly old stellar population-dominated, star-forming, and systems dominated by AGN-activity (Jarrett et al. 2011; Stern et al. 2012).”
Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, methodology): “…mid-IR photometry taken using the IRAC instrument on the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope (e.g., Lacy et al. 2004; Stern et al. 2005; AlonsoHerrero et al. 2006; Donley et al. 2012, or more recently using WISE (e.g., Jarrett et al. 2011; Stern et al. 2012; Mateos et al. 2012), which we harness here.”
Growing supermassive black holes in the late stages of galaxy mergers are heavily obscured (2017, methodology): “Similarly, we also used the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite (WISE, Wright et al. 2010) colours, adopting W 1 − W 2 > 0.8 as threshold for the presence of an AGN (Stern et al. 2012).”
New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths (2016, methodology): “In addition, the WISE colours for this event is consistent with those of a luminous AGN (Stern et al. 2012), while based on pre-flare data this source was classified as an AGN in the VCV catalogue (Véron-Cetty & Véron 2010).”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: QUASAR TARGET SELECTION (2015, methodology): “In addition, a 10σ detection in WISE W2 is equivalent to i ∼ 19.8 (Stern et al. 2012), which may not detect all quasars to the effective eBOSS limits of r ∼ 22.”
Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, background): “Furthermore, MIR identification can find AGN that are hard to detect in the X-rays, either due to obscurations or to intrinsic X-ray faintness (e.g. Stern et al. 2012, see also Sect.”
A Test of the Cosmological Principle with Quasars (2020, methodology): “We select all sources in the CatWISE2020 catalog with valid measurements in W1 and W2, which are the most sensitive to AGN emission (e.g., Stern et al. 2012).”
EXTENDING THE NEARBY GALAXY HERITAGE WITH WISE: FIRST RESULTS FROM THE WISE ENHANCED RESOLUTION GALAXY ATLAS (2012, background): “The color W1−W2 is a metric for the steepness of the falling R-J tail and is also sensitive to nuclear activity (Stern et al. 2012), for the sample is relatively narrow in range, ∼0.2 mag, between the elliptical galaxies and the star-forming galaxies – for the most part sampling the same evolved…”
MID-INFRARED SELECTION OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI WITH THE WIDE-FIELD INFRARED SURVEY EXPLORER. II. PROPERTIES OF WISE-SELECTED ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI IN THE NDWFS BOÖTES FIELD (2012, background): “C O ] 2 Stern et al. (2012) presented a study of WISE selection of AGN in the 2 deg2 COSMOS field, finding that a simple criterion W1–W2≥0.8 provides a highly reliable and complete AGN sample for W2<15.05, where the W1 and W2 passbands are centered at 3.4µm and 4.6µm, respectively.”
THE CHANDRA COSMOS LEGACY SURVEY: OPTICAL/IR IDENTIFICATIONS (2015, background): “X-ray data play an important role in the selection of AGN, because at these energies the contamination from non-nuclear emission, mainly due to star-formation processes, is far less significant than in optical and infrared surveys (Donley et al. 2008, 2012; Stern et al. 2012; Lehmer et al. 2012).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – IX. Merger-induced AGN activity as traced by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (2014, methodology): “Note thatWISEidentifies AGNs only if they are energetically dominant regardless of whether or not they are obscured in the optical (Stern et al. 2012).”