Rick Edelson, Matthew A. Malkan
We have developed the "S_IX" statistic to identify bright, highly-likely Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) candidates solely on the basis of WISE, 2MASS and Rosat all-sky survey data. This statistic was optimized with SDSS data and tested with Lick 3-m Kast spectroscopy. We find that sources with S_IX < 0 have a >~95% likelihood of being an AGN (defined in this paper as a Seyfert 1, quasar or blazar). Application to the currently available WISE/2MASS/RASS data yields the "W2R" sample of 1,924 sources with S_IX < 0, only 831 of which are currently in the Veron-Cetty and Veron (VCV) catalog of spectroscopically confirmed AGN. This indicates that the W2R sample contains ~1,000 new, relatively bright (J <~ 16) AGN. We utilize the W2R sample to quantify biases and incompleteness in the VCV catalog. We find it is highly complete for bright (J < 14), northern (declination > -20^o) AGN, but the completeness drops below 50% for fainter, southern samples. Once the full WISE dataset is released, it will be possible to use the S_IX and similar statistics to identify AGN in any (sufficiently large) region of sky. This approach has also led to the spectroscopic identification of 10 new AGN in the Kepler field, more than doubling the number of AGN being monitored by Kepler.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.1942
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