2MASS Extended Source Catalog: Overview and Algorithms

By Thomas H. Jarrett, T. Chester, R. Cutri, S. Schneider, M. Skrutskie, J. Huchra. 2000

746 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) will observe over 1,000,000 galaxies and extended Galactic sources covering the entire sky at wavelengths between 1 and 2 μm. Most of these galaxies will be newly cataloged objects. The survey catalog will have both high completeness and reliability down to J = 15.0 mag and Ks = 13.5 mag, equivalent to 1.6 and 2.9 mJy, respectively. Galaxies as small as 10″ are resolved, and those as large as ∼2.′5 are fully imaged. 2MASS will discover galaxies never seen before in the "zone of avoidance" caused by the obscuring effects of Galactic dust and gas, limited only by the extreme number of stars at very low Galactic latitude, especially toward the Galactic center. This paper describes the basic algorithms used to detect and characterize extended sources in the 2MASS database and catalog. Critical procedures include tracking the point-spread function, image background removal, artifact removal, photometry and basic parameterization, star-galaxy discrimination, and object classification using a decision tree technique. We introduce and provide examples of the types of extended sources that 2MASS detects across the sky, including galaxies, Galactic nebulae and resolved stellar objects, multiple stars and clusters, and, finally, artifacts arising from bright stars and transient events. A future paper will provide a full statistical analysis and verification of the completeness, reliability, and integrity of the first release catalog, as well as some of the basic scientific results of the catalog, including galaxy colors, number counts, and redshift distribution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca476abe96c81bf18e82d8de1ccafe4eaae3b28b

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Citations in the corpus

The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: power-spectrum analysis of the final data set and cosmological implications (2005, methodology): “In the preliminary 100k release (Colless et al. 2001), the APM magnitudes were directly recalibrated using CCD data from the EIS (Prandoni et al. 1999; Arnouts et al. 2001) and 2MASS (Jarrett et al. 2000) (see Norberg et al. 2002b).”
The 6dF Galaxy Survey: z \approx 0 measurement of the growth rate and sigma_8 (2012, methodology): “The near-infrared photometric selection was based on total magnitudes from the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey – Extended Source Catalog (2MASS XSC; Jarrett et al. 2000).”
The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: The bJ-band galaxy luminosity function and survey selection function (2001, methodology): “In the absence of this information, we resorted to the only uniform all-sky source of digital galaxy photometry: the near-infrared 2-Micron All-Sky Survey (Jarrett et al. 2000).”
The K-Band Galaxy Luminosity Function (2000, methodology): “The elliptical isophotal magnitudes give slightly more accurate Ñux estimates unless stellar contamination skews the parameters of the ellipse (see Jarrett et al. 2000a).”
Galaxy groups and clouds in the local (z∼ 0.01) Universe (2010, background): “The updates of the observational database on the radial velocities, and appearance of a homogeneous across the sky 2MASS near-infrared photometric survey (Jarrett et al. 2003, 2000) enables us to study the structure and kinematics of nearby galaxy groups with significantly greater detail.”
K-Corrections and Filter Transformations in the Ultraviolet, Optical, and Near-Infrared (2006, methodology): “For 2MASS we use the extrapolated magnitudes from the Extended Source Catalog (Jarrett et al. 2000).”
Spitzer Quasar and ULIRG Evolution Study (QUEST). II. The Spectral Energy Distributions of Palomar-Green Quasars (2007, methodology): “The NIR data were obtained from various sources, in particular Neugebauer et al. (1987) and the 2MASS extended and point source catalogs (Jarrett et al. 2000).”
The 2dF galaxy redshift survey: near-infrared galaxy luminosity functions (2000, background): “Details of how extended sources are identified and their photometric properties measured are given by Jarrett et al. (2000).”
UPDATED NEARBY GALAXY CATALOG (2013, methodology): “Some local vs. global parameters According to Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the cosmic variation of luminosity in the cubic cell with a 30 Mpc side amounts to ∼ 30% and drops to a value of ∼ 10% in a cell with an edge of 95 Mpc (Papai & Szapudi 2010).”
Nearby Debris Disk Systems with High Fractional Luminosity Reconsidered (2006, methodology): “A source included in the IRAS Small Scale Structure Catalog (Helou &Walker 1988) or in the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (Jarrett et al. 2000) is located within 10 of the IRAS position.”
THE SPITZER–WISE SURVEY OF THE ECLIPTIC POLES (2011, methodology): “…due to complex shapes and extended emission arising beyond the PSF. Galaxies are identified through visual inspection; their position, shape and size are determined using interactive tools that were designed specifically for 2MASS resolved galaxy characterization (Jarrett et al. 2000, 2003).”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: mapping the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations (2011, methodology): “Observed galaxies were selected from the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (Jarrett et al. 2000) and the redshifts were obtained with the 6-degree Field (6dF) multi-fibre instrument at the U.K. Schmidt Telescope between 2001 and 2006.”
The ATLAS3D project – III. A census of the stellar angular momentum within the effective radius of early‐type galaxies: unveiling the distribution of fast and slow rotators (2011, background): “The parent sample is comprised of all galaxies within a volume of 42 Mpc, brighter than MKs = −21.5 mag (2MASS, see Jarrett et al. 2000) and constrained by the observability (|δ − 29◦| < 35◦ and away from the Galactic equatorial plane).”
Resolved stellar mass maps of galaxies. I: method and implications for global mass estimates (2009, methodology): “Finally, we check (and refine where needed) the photometric calibration using stars from 2MASS (Jarrett et al. 2000): the final photometric accuracy (zero point) is typically 0.1 mag.”
CAIRNS: The Cluster and Infall Region Nearby Survey. I. Redshifts and Mass Profiles (2003, methodology): “We use photometry from the final extended source catalog (XSC, Jarrett et al. 2000).”
The K20 survey. V. The evolution of the near-IR Luminosity Function (2003, background): “Only recently the 2MASS (Jarrett et al. 2000) surveys allowed accurate determinations of the local near-IR luminosity and of the Galaxy Stellar-mass functions (Cole et al. 2001; Kochanek et al. 2001), while only few attempts have been made to reconstruct their evolution with redshift using deep…”
The ATLAS3D Project – XXVIII. Dynamically driven star formation suppression in early-type galaxies (2014, methodology): “To be consistent with the other papersin this series, we use theKs,total magnitude (parameter km ext from the 2MASS catalogue; Jarrett et al. 2000; Skrutskie et al. 2006), as tabulated in Paper I. TheseKs,total magnitudes are measured over large apertures, to include the total flux from the galaxy…”