CHARACTERIZING THE MID-INFRARED EXTRAGALACTIC SKY WITH WISE AND SDSS

By Lin Yan, E. Donoso, Chaowei Tsai, Daniel Stern, R. Assef, P. Eisenhardt, A. Blain, R. Cutri, Thomas H. Jarrett, S. Stanford and 3 more. 2012

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has completed its all-sky survey in four channels at 3.4–22 μm, detecting hundreds of millions of objects. We merge the WISE mid-infrared data with optical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and provide a phenomenological characterization of WISE extragalactic sources. WISE is most sensitive at 3.4 μm (W1) and least sensitive at 22 μm (W4). The W1 band probes massive early-type galaxies out to z ≳ 1. This is more distant than SDSS identified early-type galaxies, consistent with the fact that 28% of 3.4 μm sources have faint or no r-band counterparts (r > 22.2). In contrast, 92%–95% of 12 μm and 22 μm sources have SDSS optical counterparts with r ⩽ 22.2. WISE 3.4 μm detects 89.8% of the entire SDSS QSO catalog at S/NW1 >7σ, but only 18.9% at 22 μm with S/NW4 > 5σ. We show that WISE colors alone are effective in isolating stars (or local early-type galaxies), star-forming galaxies, and strong active galactic nuclei (AGNs)/QSOs at z ≲ 3. We highlight three major applications of WISE colors: (1) Selection of strong AGNs/QSOs at z ⩽ 3 using W1 − W2 > 0.8 and W2 < 15.2 criteria, producing a better census of this population. The surface density of these strong AGN/QSO candidates is 67.5 ± 0.14 deg−2. (2) Selection of dust-obscured, type-2 AGN/QSO candidates. We show that WISE W1 − W2 > 0.8, W2 < 15.2 combined with r − W2 > 6 (Vega) colors can be used to identify type-2 AGN candidates. The fraction of these type-2 AGN candidates is one-third of all WISE color-selected AGNs. (3) Selection of ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) at z ∼ 2 with extremely red colors, r − W4 > 14 or well-detected 22 μm sources lacking detections in the 3.4 and 4.6 μm bands. The surface density of z ∼ 2 ULIRG candidates selected with r − W4 > 14 is 0.9 ± 0.07 deg−2 at S/NW4 ⩾ 5 (the corresponding, lowest flux density of 2.5 mJy), which is consistent with that inferred from smaller area Spitzer surveys. Optical spectroscopy of a small number of these high-redshift ULIRG candidates confirms our selection, and reveals a possible trend that optically fainter or r − W4 redder candidates are at higher redshifts.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7dec46a2a74ea7eb8024d813018efa9a693f0d51

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Citations in the corpus

Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – IX. Merger-induced AGN activity as traced by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (2014, result): “This is reinforced by several studies that have shown that the fraction of optically selected AGNs identified as AGNs by mid-IR colour se- c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS000, 000–000 lection increases with AGN luminosity (e.g., Rovilos et al.2013; Mateos et al. 2013; Yan et al. 2013) .”
GALEX–SDSS–WISE LEGACY CATALOG (GSWLC): STAR FORMATION RATES, STELLAR MASSES, AND DUST ATTENUATIONS OF 700,000 LOW-REDSHIFT GALAXIES (2016, background): “Another advantage of performing the stellar SED fitting separately is that in a joint fit to stellar and dust emission one also has to worry about the contamination of IR emission from dust-obscured Type 2 AGN (such as Seyfert 2, or highexcitation radio galaxies, Yan et al. 2013; Pace & Salim 2016).”
Age-dating luminous red galaxies observed with the Southern African Large Telescope (2016, methodology): “We followed the method MNRAS 000, 1–11 (2016) described in Yan et al. (2013) for the matching between 2SLAQ– LRGs and WISE, including the radius matching of 3 arcsec and to a depth of r = 22.6.”
A Test of the Cosmological Principle with Quasars (2020, background): “We then remove low-redshift AGNs by excluding sources in the 2MASS extended source catalog (XSC; Jarrett et al. 2000), which contains nearly all galaxies not directly behind the Galactic plane out to z ∼ 0.1 (Jarrett 2004).”
STELLAR MASSES AND STAR FORMATION RATES FOR 1 M GALAXIES FROM SDSS+WISE (2015, result): “In line with the approach taken by Donoso et al. (2012) and Yan et al. (2013), most matches (99.08”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: QUASAR TARGET SELECTION (2015, methodology): “…mechanism for separating quasars and stars and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE ; Wright et al. 2010) data therefore provide additional information for targeting quasars that otherwise resemble stars in optical color space (e.g. Stern et al. 2012; Assef et al. 2013; Yan et al. 2013).”
Galileon gravity in light of ISW, CMB, BAO and H0 data (2017, methodology): “ulation of the WISE ISW signal requires knowledge of the redshift selection function of the survey. We use Eq. (2.5) as an analytical approximation to the selection function originally put forward in [49] (see their Fig. 4). In the Galileon model the evolution of the lensing potential and consequent”
The SDSS–2MASS–WISE 10-dimensional stellar colour locus (2014, background): “Faint objects withW1 > 11 have a much higher likelihood of being background galaxy contaminants due to increasing densities of galaxies and AGN at fainter WISE magnitudes (Yan et al. 2013, Nikutta 2014 in prep).”
GALAXY AND MASS ASSEMBLY (GAMA): MID-INFRARED PROPERTIES AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS FROM WISE (2014, methodology): “Yan et al. (2013) combine WISE and SDSS to provide a phenomenological characterization for WISE extragalactic sources.”
THE FINAL SDSS HIGH-REDSHIFT QUASAR SAMPLE OF 52 QUASARS AT z > 5.7 (2016, methodology): “They were discovered using a combination of the SDSS and WISE imaging data (see also Blain et al. 2013; Yan et al. 2013), and were also selected by our standard selection criteria mentioned in Section 2.”
WISE PHOTOMETRY FOR 400 MILLION SDSS SOURCES (2014, background): “Yan et al. (2013) give a survey of the properties of extragalactic sources, showing that SDSS–WISE colors and morphology can be used to select type2 dust-obscured quasars and ultraluminous infrared galaxies at redshift ∼2.”