4.7 Article

Catalogues of active galactic nuclei from Gaia and unWISE data

Journal

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 489, Issue 4, Pages 4741-4759

Publisher

OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz2487

Keywords

catalogues; galaxies: active; quasars: general

Funding

  1. Royal Society - K. C. Wong International Fellowship [NF170995]
  2. National Science Foundation (NSF) [AST-1813881]
  3. Heising-Simons Foundation [2018-1030]
  4. Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
  5. European Research Council (ERC)
  6. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  7. STFC [ST/S000623/1] Funding Source: UKRI

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We present two catalogues of active galactic nucleus (AGN) candidates selected from the latest data of two all-sky surveys - Data Release 2 of the Gaia mission and the unWISE catalogue of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). We train a random forest classifier to predict the probability of each source in the Gaia-unWISE joint sample being an AGN, P-RF, based on Gaia astrometric and photometric measurements and unWISE photometry. The two catalogues, which we designate C75 and R85, are constructed by applying different PRF threshold cuts to achieve an overall completeness of 75 per cent (approximate to 90 per cent at Gaia G <= 20 mag) and reliability of 85 per cent, respectively. The C75 (R85) catalogue contains 2734 464 (2182 193) AGN candidates across the effective 36 000 deg(2) sky, of which approximate to 0.91 (0.52) million are new discoveries. Photometric redshifts of the AGN candidates are derived by a random forest regressor using Gaia and WISE magnitudes and colours. The estimated overall photometric redshift accuracy is 0.11. Cross-matching the AGN candidates with a sample of known bright cluster galaxies, we identify a high-probability strongly lensed AGN candidate system, SDSS J1326+4806, with a large image separation of 21 ''.06. All the AGN candidates in our catalogues will have similar to 5-yr long light curves from Gaia by the end of the mission, and thus will be a great resource for AGN variability studies. Our AGN catalogues will also be helpful in AGN target selections for future spectroscopic surveys, especially those in the Southern hemisphere. The C75 catalogue can be downloaded at https://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/similar to ypshu/AGN_Catalogues.html.

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