IDENTIFICATION OF 1.4 MILLION ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI IN THE MID-INFRARED USING WISE DATA

By N. Secrest, R. Dudik, B. Dorland, N. Zacharias, V. Makarov, A. Fey, J. Frouard, C. Finch. 2015

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an all-sky sample of ≈1.4 million active galactic nuclei (AGNs) meeting a two-color infrared photometric selection criteria for AGNs as applied to sources from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer final catalog release (AllWISE). We assess the spatial distribution and optical properties of our sample and find that the results are consistent with expectations for AGNs. These sources have a mean density of ≈38 AGNs per square degree on the sky, and their apparent magnitude distribution peaks at g ≈ 20, extending to objects as faint as g ≈ 26. We test the AGN selection criteria against a large sample of optically identified stars and determine the “leakage” (that is, the probability that a star detected in an optical survey will be misidentified as a quasi-stellar object (QSO) in our sample) rate to be ≤4.0 × 10−5. We conclude that our sample contains almost no optically identified stars (≤0.041%), making this sample highly promising for future celestial reference frame work as it significantly increases the number of all-sky, compact extragalactic objects. We further compare our sample to catalogs of known AGNs/QSOs and find a completeness value of ≳84% (that is, the probability of correctly identifying a known AGN/QSO is at least 84%) for AGNs brighter than a limiting magnitude of R ≲ 19. Our sample includes approximately 1.1 million previously uncataloged AGNs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a54a5d6e56d61c51f2b2d17468034226cfcb0f7

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 Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

A Test of the Cosmological Principle with Quasars (2020, methodology): “Because of the unique power of mid-infrared photometry to pick out AGNs, WISE may be used to create reliable AGN/quasar catalogs based on mid-infrared color alone (e.g., Secrest et al. 2015).”
The WISE AGN Catalog (2017, methodology): “Secrest et al. (2015) WISE AGN Catalog Recently, Secrest et al. (2015) presented an all-sky AGN catalog selected purely on their WISE colors, based on the selection criteria of Mateos et al. (2012).”
Gaia Data Release 2 (2018, methodology): “The fraction of stars among the AllWISE AGN sources is estimated at ≤0.041% (Secrest et al. 2015), or .230 in this sample, but only a fraction of them may pass the criteria in Eq.”
The DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: Final Target Selection, Design, and Validation (2022, methodology): “Using optical data from the HyperLeda catalog (Makarov et al. 2014) and infrared data from the ALLWISE catalog (Secrest et al. 2015), the SGA identified large galaxies with D(25)> 20″, where D(25) is the diameter at the 25 mag arcsec−2 surface brightness isophote, a conventional measure of galaxy…”