Effectiveness of WISE colour-based selection techniques to uncover obscured AGN. Issue Volume 9:Issue S304(2013) (25th July 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mateos, S.
• Is Part Of: Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union. Volume 9:Issue S304(2013)
• Page Start: 209
• Page End: 212
• Publication Date: 2014-07-25
• Subjects: galaxies: general, -- galaxies: active, -- infrared: galaxies; Astronomy -- Congresses; Astronomy -- Periodicals; 520
• DOI: 10.1017/S1743921314003792
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1743-9213

Abstract

Abstract: We present a highly reliable and efficient mid-infrared colour-based selection technique for luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) survey. Our technique is designed to identify objects with red mid-infrared power-law spectral energy distributions. We studied the dependency of our mid-infrared selection on the AGN intrinsic luminosity and the effectiveness of our technique to uncover obscured AGN missed in X-ray surveys. To do so we used two samples of luminous AGN independently selected in hard X-ray and optical surveys. We used the largest catalogue of 887 [OIII ] λ5007-selected type 2 quasars (QSO2s) at z≲0.83 in the literature from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the 258 hard (>4.5 keV) X-ray-selected AGN from the Bright Ultrahard XMM-Newton Survey (BUXS). The effectiveness of our mid-infrared selection technique increases with the AGN luminosity. At high luminosities and at least up to z ~1 our technique is very effective at identifying both Compton-thin and Compton-thick AGN.