- ID:
- ivo://nasa.heasarc/allwiseagn
- Title:
- AllWISE Catalog of Mid-IR AGNs
- Short Name:
- ALLWISEAGN
- Date:
- 07 Mar 2025
- Publisher:
- NASA/GSFC HEASARC
- Description:
- This table contains an all-sky sample of ~1.4 million active galactic nuclei (AGNs) meeting a two-color infrared photometric selection criterion for AGNs as applied to sources from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer final catalog release (AllWISE). The authors assess the spatial distribution and optical properties of their sample and find that the results are consistent with expectations for AGNs. These sources have a mean density of ~38 AGNs per square degree on the sky, and their apparent magnitude distribution peaks at g ~ 20, extending to objects as faint as g ~ 26. The authors test the AGN selection criterion against a large sample of optically identified stars and determine the "leakage" (that is, the probability that a star detected in an optical survey will be misidentified as a quasi-stellar object (QSO) in their sample) rate to be <= 4.0 x 10<sup>-5</sup>. They conclude that their sample contains almost no optically identified stars (<= 0.041%), making this sample highly promising for future celestial reference frame work as it significantly increases the number of all-sky, compact extragalactic objects. The authors further compare their sample to catalogs of known AGNs/QSOs and find a completeness value of >= 84% (that is, the probability of correctly identifying a known AGN/QSO is at least 84%) for AGNs brighter than a limiting magnitude of R <= 19. This sample includes approximately 1.1 million previously uncataloged AGNs. The WISE survey is an all-sky mid-IR survey at 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 microns (W1, W2, W3, and W4, respectively) conducted between 2010 January 7 and August 6, during the cryogenic mission phase, and first made available to the public on 2011 April 14. WISE has angular resolutions of 6.1, 6.4, 6.5, and 12.0 arcseconds in its four bands, respectively. The AllWISE data release, which was used for this work, incorporates data from the WISE Full Cryogenic, 3-Band Cryo, and NEOWISE Post-Cryo survey (Mainzer et al. 2014, ApJ, 792, 30) phases, which were co-added to achieve a depth of coverage ~0.4 mag deeper than previous data releases. AllWISE contains the positions, apparent motions, magnitudes, and point-spread function (PSF)-profile fit information for almost 748 million objects. Astrometric calibration of sources in the WISE catalog was done by correlation with bright stars from the 2MASS point source catalog, and the astrometric accuracy for sources in the AllWISE release was further improved by taking into account the proper motions of these reference stars, taken from the fourth USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC4, Zacharias et al. 2013, AJ, 145, 44). A comparison with ICRF sources shows that AllWISE Catalog sources in the brightness range of 8 < W1 < 12 mag have positional accuracies to within 50 mas, and half of these sources have positional accuracies to within 20 mas. For more details on the WISE mission, see Wright et al. (2010, AJ, 140, 1868). The authors took all sources from the AllWISE catalog following Equations (3) and (4) from Mateos et al. (2012, MNRAS, 426, 3271) and they require that all of their sources have S/N >= 5 in the first three bands, as recommended in Mateos et al. (2012); as a further constraint, they limit their results to those with cc_flags = "0000," meaning that the sources are unaffected by known artifacts such as diffraction spikes, persistence, halos, or optical ghosts. In order to characterize the optical properties of their sample, the authors cross-matched it to SDSS-DR12, which is the final data release of SDSS-III (Eisenstein et al. 2011, AJ, 142, 72), within a radial tolerance of R < 1", obtaining 424,366 matches. To determine the fraction of false positive positional matches (that is, incorrectly correlating an object in their sample with a different SDSS object due to random positional agreement), they performed the same match on a scrambled version of their sample coordinates, determining that less than 1% of other cross-matches are false positive positional matches between the two catalogs. The authors also cross-matched their sample sources with he second release of the Large Quasar Astrometric Catalog (LQAC-2; Souchay et al. 2012, A&A, 537, A99), which contains 187,504 quasars, including radio-selected quasars from the ICRF2, optically selected quasars from SDSS, and infrared-selected quasars from 2MASS, and thus represents a robust sample of quasars over a wide range of wavelengths. They find that 93,403 quasars from LQAC-2 have clean detections. The majority of non-detections are due to sources in LQAC-2 that are too faint, having R >~ 19. This table was created by the HEASARC in January 2016 based on the machine-readable version of Table 1 from the reference paper which was obtained from the ApJS web site. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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- ID:
- ivo://nasa.heasarc/uvqs
- Title:
- UV-Bright Quasar Survey (UVQS) DR1 Catalog
- Short Name:
- UVQS
- Date:
- 07 Mar 2025
- Publisher:
- NASA/GSFC HEASARC
- Description:
- This table contains data from the first data release (DR1) from the UV-bright Quasar Survey (UVQS) for new z ~ 1 active galactic nuclei (AGN) across the sky. Using simple GALEX UV and WISE near-IR color selection criteria, the authors generated a list of 1,450 primary candidates with FUV < 18.5 mag, that is contained in the HEASARC table (entries with source_sample = 'P'). They obtained discovery spectra, primarily on 3m-class telescopes, for 1,040 of these candidates and confirmed 86% as AGN, with redshifts generally at z > 0.5. Including a small set of observed secondary candidates, the authors report the discovery of 217 AGN with GALEX FUV magnitudes < 18 mag that previously had no reported spectroscopic redshifts. These are excellent potential targets for UV spectroscopy before the end of the Hubble Space Telescope mission. The main data products of UVQS are publicly available through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). The authors have performed an all-sky survey for z ~ 1, FUV-bright quasars selected from GALEX and WISE photometry. In several of the observing runs, conditions were unexpectedly favorable and we exhausted the primary candidates at certain right ascension ranges. To fill the remaining observing time, they generated a secondary candidate list. This secondary set of 2,010 candidates is also contained in this HEASARC table (entries with source_sample = 'S'). The authors proceeded to obtain discovery-quality long-slit spectra (i.e., low-dispersion, large-wavelength coverage, modest signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of their UV-bright Quasar Survey (UVQS) candidates in one calendar year. The principal facilities were: (i) the dual Kast spectrometer on the 3m Shane telescope at the Lick Observatory; (ii) the Boller & Chivens (BCS) spectrometer on the Irenee du Pont 100-inch telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory; and (iii) the Calar Alto Faint Object Spectrograph on the CAHA 2.2-meter telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory (CAHA). They acquired an additional ~20 spectra on larger aperture telescopes (Keck/ESI, MMT/MBC, Magellan/MagE) during twilight or under poor observing conditions. Typical exposure times were limited to < ~200s, with adjustments for fainter sources or sub-optimal observing conditions. Table 3 in the reference paper provides a list of the details of the observations of these candidates. From the total candidates list of 3,460 objects, the authors measured high-quality redshifts (redshift quality flag values of 3 or greater) for 1,121 sources. They assumed that every source with a recessional velocity v<sub>r</sub> = z * c < 500 km s<sup>-1</sup> was "Galactic", which they associate with the Galaxy and members of the Local Group. This included sources where the eigenspectra fits were poor yet a low v<sub>r</sub> was indisputable (e.g., stars). Many of these were assigned z = 0 exactly. The remainder of the UVQS sources were assumed to be extragalactic AGN, and the derived redshift information for these sources (which was given in Table 4 of the reference paper) has been incorporated into this HEASARC representation of UVQS. Finally, there were 93 sources with good-quality spectra for which we cannot the authors could not recover a secure redshift. The majority of these have been previously cataloged as blazars (or BL Lac objects). Table 6 in the reference paper lists the sample of these unknown or insecure redshift objects. This table was created by the HEASARC in April 2017 based upon the <a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/AJ/152/25">CDS Catalog J/AJ/152/25</a> files table1.dat, table2.dat, and table4.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
