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Description
The authors of this catalog have developed the S<sub>IX</sub> statistic to identify bright, highly likely active galactic nucleus (AGN) candidates solely on the basis of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), and ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS) data. This statistic was optimized with data from the preliminary WISE survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and tested with Lick 3 m Kast spectroscopy. The authors find that sources with S<sub>IX</sub> < 0 have a >~ 95% likelihood of being an AGN (defined in this paper as a Seyfert 1, quasar, or blazar). This statistic was then applied to the full WISE/2MASS/RASS dataset, including the final WISE data release, to yield the "W2R" sample of 4316 sources with S<sub>IX</sub> < 0. Only 2209 of these sources are currently in the Veron-Cetty and Veron (VCV) Catalog of spectroscopically confirmed AGNs, indicating that the W2R sample contains nearly 2000 new, relatively bright (J <~ 16) AGNs. The authors utilize the W2R sample to quantify biases and incompleteness in the VCV Catalog. They find that it is highly complete for bright (J < 14), northern AGNs, but the completeness drops below 50% for fainter, southern samples and for sources near the Galactic plane. This approach also led to the spectroscopic identification of 10 new AGNs in the Kepler field, more than doubling the number of AGNs being monitored by Kepler. The W2R sample contains better than 1 bright AGN every 10 deg<sup>2</sup>, permitting construction of AGN samples in any sufficiently large region of sky. This table contains the 4316 sources comprising the W2R sample. This table was created by the HEASARC in June 2012 based on an electronic version of Table 3 from the reference paper which was obtained from the ApJ website. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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