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Description
The supermassive black holes at the center of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are surrounded by obscuring matter that can block nuclear radiation. Depending on the amount of blocked radiation, the flux from the AGN can be too faint to be detected by currently flying hard X-ray (above 15keV) missions. At these energies only ~1% of the intensity of the cosmic X-ray background (CXB) can be resolved into point-like sources that are AGNs. In this work, we address the question of undetected sources contributing to the CXB with a very sensitive and new hard X-ray survey: the Swift-INTEGRAL X-ray (SIX) survey, which is obtained with the new approach of combining the Swift/BAT and INTEGRAL/IBIS X-ray observations. We merge the observations of both missions, which enhances the exposure time and reduces systematic uncertainties. As a result, we obtain a new survey over a wide sky area of 6200deg^2^ that is more sensitive than the surveys of Swift/BAT or INTEGRAL/IBIS alone. Our sample comprises 113 sources: 86 AGNs (Seyfert-like and blazars), 5 galaxies, 2 clusters of galaxies, 3 Galactic sources, 3 previously detected unidentified X-ray sources, and 14 unidentified sources. The scientific outcome from the study of the sample has been properly addressed to study the evolution of AGNs at redshift below 0.4.
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