Swift BAT Survey of AGNs

By J. Tueller, R. Mushotzky, S. Barthelmy, J. Cannizzo, N. Gehrels, C. Markwardt, G. Skinner, L. Winter. 2007

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We present the results of the analysis of the first 9 months of data of the Swift BAT survey of AGNs in the 14-195 keV band. Using archival X-ray data or follow-up Swift XRT observations, we have identified 129 (103 AGNs) of 130 objects detected at | b| > 15° and with significance >4.8 σ. One source remains unidentified. These same X-ray data have allowed measurement of the X-ray properties of the objects. We fit a power law to the log N–log S distribution, and find the slope to be 1.42 ± 0.14. Characterizing the differential luminosity function data as a broken power law, we find a break luminosity log L*(erg s−1) = 43.85 ± 0.26, a low-luminosity power law slope a = 0.84+ 0.16−0.22, and a high-luminosity power law slope b = 2.55+ 0.43−0.30, similar to the values that have been reported based on INTEGRAL data. We obtain a mean photon index 1.98 in the 14-195 keV band, with an rms spread of 0.27. Integration of our luminosity function gives a local volume density of AGNs above 1041 erg s−1 of 2.4 × 10−3 Mpc−3, which is about 10% of the total luminous local galaxy density above M* = − 19.75. We have obtained X-ray spectra from the literature and from Swift XRT follow-up observations. These show that the distribution of log nH is essentially flat from nH = 1020 to 1024 cm−2, with 50% of the objects having column densities of less than 1022 cm−2. BAT Seyfert galaxies have a median redshift of 0.03, a maximum log luminosity of 45.1, and approximately half have log nH > 22.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4cdb881c9e655e8a3eadbc3d547efe67b7a9953

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Citations in the corpus

THREE-YEAR SWIFT–BAT SURVEY OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI: RECONCILING THEORY AND OBSERVATIONS? (2010, methodology): “The large majority (86) of these NH measurements comes from earlier results of the Swift survey (Tueller et al. 2008; Winter et al. 2008, 2009a, 2009b) while for the rest (16) we used single-source publications (see Table 5 for details).”
Resolving the mid-infrared cores of local Seyferts (2009, result): “Some variability (by factors of 1.6 and 0.5 respectively) as compared to the results of Tueller et al. (2008) was discussed by Ueda et al. (2007); we thus assign factor of 2 luminosity uncertainties.”
An XMM–Newton spectral survey of 12 μm selected galaxies – I. X-ray data (2010, background): “Beckmann et al. (2006) and Beckmann et al. (2009) have presented catalogues for INTEGRAL selected AGN, which total 199 after 5 years of observations, and Tueller et al. (2008) and Tueller et al. (2010) have presented 229 Swift/BAT selected Seyfert galaxies after 22 months of observations.”
The PalermoSwift-BAT hard X-ray catalogue: II. Results after 39 months of sky survey (2009, methodology): “…ISGRI catalogue, the GRB positions and the newly discovered Swift sources documented in literature (Markwardt et al. 2005; Aj llo et al. 2008a; Tueller et al. 2008), we discarded the files where: – the bright sources in the BAT field of view are detected at more than 10 arcmin from their…”
The 105-Month Swift-BAT All-sky Hard X-Ray Survey (2018, background): “Tueller et al. (2008) focused on active galactic nuclei (AGN) observed from the first 9 months of data, and later Tueller et al. (2010) provided a catalog of the first 22 months of data.”
THE 22 MONTH SWIFT-BAT ALL-SKY HARD X-RAY SURVEY (2009, background): “The 22 month BAT catalog reinforces and enhances the results from the 3 month (Markwardt et al. 2005) and 9 month (Tueller et al. 2008) catalogs and shows that the BAT survey continues to increase in sensitivity roughly as the square root of time and is far from being confusion or systematics…”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, unknown): “By comparison, on the basis of a hard X-ray selected AGN sample (from the Swift-BAT survey; Tueller et al. 2008, 2010), Koss et al. (2010) estimated the rate of major mergers to be ≈ 20%; the fraction rises to ≈ 50% if galaxy interactions are also included.”
MID-INFRARED SELECTION OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI WITH THE WIDE-FIELD INFRARED SURVEY EXPLORER. I. CHARACTERIZING WISE-SELECTED ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI IN COSMOS (2012, background): “Specifically, recent surveys with Swift and INTEGRAL have only identified a few dozen heavily obscured (e.g., Compton-thick) AGN, all at very low redshift, z ≈ 0 (e.g., Bassani et al. 1999; Vignali & Comastri 2002; Ajello et al. 2008; Tueller et al. 2008; Burningham et al. 2011).”
GALAXY ZOO: THE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT CO-EVOLUTION OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AND THEIR EARLY- AND LATE-TYPE HOST GALAXIES (2010, background): “However, current surveys of the hard X-ray sky remain too shallow or are confined to small areas compared to SDSS (e.g., Tueller et al. 2008; Winter et al. 2008; Treister et al. 2009a).”
THE LUMINOSITY FUNCTION OF FERMI-DETECTED FLAT-SPECTRUM RADIO QUASARS (2011, background): “With this deep exposure, BAT reaches a sensitivity of ∼ 10 − 11 erg cm − 2 s − 1 on most of the high-latitude sky (e.g., Tueller et al. 2008; Ajello et al. 2008a, 2008c; Cusumano et al. 2010).”
TOWARD THE STANDARD POPULATION SYNTHESIS MODEL OF THE X-RAY BACKGROUND: EVOLUTION OF X-RAY LUMINOSITY AND ABSORPTION FUNCTIONS OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI INCLUDING COMPTON-THICK POPULATIONS (2014, methodology): “As noticed from the Figure, we confirm the trend reported previously (e.g., Zdziarski et al. 2000; Tueller et al. 2008; Burlon et al. 2011) that the average slope of type-1 AGNs is larger than that of type-2 AGNs, even after properly taking into account the reflection components in the spectra.”
COMPTON-THICK ACCRETION IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2015, methodology): “The figure shows the values of fCT obtained by our work, by Alexander et al. (2013) and Civano et al. (2015) using NuSTAR, and by Tueller et al. (2008) for the 9-month Swift/BAT catalog.”
THE EVOLUTION OF SWIFT/BAT BLAZARS AND THE ORIGIN OF THE MeV BACKGROUND (2009, methodology): “This is not 3The different value of H0 and energy band that Tueller et al. (2008) adopt produce the net effect that the luminosities quoted here are directly comparable to those quoted by Tueller et al. (2008) without the need of a conversion factor (i.e. the conversion factor is ∼1).”
THE SPACE DENSITY OF COMPTON-THICK ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS AND THE X-RAY BACKGROUND (2009, methodology): “2 we show the observed NH distribution for the sources in the Swift/BAT sample of Tueller et al. (2008) obtained from very simple spectral fitting assuming an intrinsic absorbed power-law spectrum; the distribution from the AGN population synthesis models of Treister & Urry (2005), adapted to the…”