NuSTAR Serendipitous Survey 40-Month Secondary Source Catalog

This table contains some of the science results from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Serendipitous Survey. The catalog incorporates data taken during the first 40 months of NuSTAR operation, which provide ~20 Ms of effective exposure time over 331 fields, with an areal coverage of 13 deg&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. The primary catalog (available as the HEASARC &lt;a href="/W3Browse/nustar/nustarssc.html"&gt;NUSTARSSC&lt;/a&gt; table) contains 498 sources (the abstract of the reference paper states that there are 497 sources) detected in total over the 3-24 keV energy range. There are 276 sources with spectroscopic redshifts and classifications, largely resulting from the authors&#39; extensive campaign of ground-based spectroscopic follow-up. The authors characterize the overall sample in terms of the X-ray, optical, and infrared source properties. The sample is primarily composed of active galactic nuclei (AGN), detected over a large range in redshift from z = 0.002 to 3.4 (median redshift z of 0.56), but also includes 16 spectroscopically confirmed Galactic sources. There is a large range in X-ray flux, from log (f_3-24_keV) ~ -14 to -11 (in units of erg s&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt; cm&lt;sup&gt;-2&lt;/sup&gt;), and in rest-frame 10-40 keV luminosity, from log (L&lt;sub&gt;10-40keV&lt;/sub&gt;) ~ 39 to 46 (in units of erg s&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt;), with a median of 44.1. Approximately 79% of the NuSTAR sources have lower-energy (&lt;10 keV) X-ray counterparts from XMM-Newton, Chandra, and Swift XRT observations. The mid-infrared (MIR) analysis, using WISE all-sky survey data, shows that MIR AGN color selections miss a large fraction of the NuSTAR-selected AGN population, from ~15% at the highest luminosities (L&lt;sub&gt;X&lt;/sub&gt; &gt; 10&lt;sup&gt;44&lt;/sup&gt; erg s&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt;) to ~80% at the lowest luminosities (L&lt;sub&gt;X&lt;/sub&gt; &lt; 10&lt;sup&gt;43&lt;/sup&gt; erg s&lt;sup&gt;-1&lt;/sup&gt;). The authors&#39; optical spectroscopic analysis finds that the observed fraction of optically obscured AGN (i.e., the type 2 fraction) is F&lt;sub&gt;Type2&lt;/sub&gt; = 53 (+14, -15) per cent, for a well-defined subset of the 8-24 keV selected sample. This is higher, albeit at a low significance level, than the type 2 fraction measured for redshift- and luminosity-matched AGNs selected by &lt; 10 keV X-ray missions. This table contains the Secondary NuSTAR Serendipitous Source Catalog of 64 sources found using wavdetect to search for significant emission peaks in the FPMA and FPMB data separately (see Section 2.1.1 of Alexander et al. 2013, ApJ, 773, 125) and in the combined A+B data. These sources are listed in Table 7 of the reference paper. This method was developed alongside the primary one (Section 2.3 of the reference paper) in order to investigate the optimum source detection methodologies for NuSTAR and to identify sources in regions of the NuSTAR coverage that are automatically excluded in the primary source detection. The authors emphasize that these secondary sources are not used in any of the science analyses presented in their paper. Nevertheless, these secondary sources are robust NuSTAR detections, some of which will be incorporated in future NuSTAR studies, and for many of them (35 out of the 43 sources with spectroscopic identifications) the authors have obtained new spectroscopic redshifts and classifications through their follow-up program. The X-ray photometric parameters for 4 sources are left blank as in these cases the A+B data prohibit reliable photometric constraints. Additional information on these Secondary Catalog sources that the authors obtained using optical spectroscopy is available in Table 8 of the reference paper (q.v.). This table does NOT contain the the 498 sources in the &lt;a href="/W3Browse/nustar/nustarssc.html"&gt;Primary NuSTAR Serendipitous Source Catalog&lt;/a&gt; that were found using the source detection procedure described in Section 2.3 of the reference paper, and that are listed in Table 5 (op. cit.). This table was created by the HEASARC in July 2017 based on the machine-readable version of Table 7 from the reference paper, the Secondary NuSTAR Serendipitous Source Catalog, that was obtained from the ApJ web site. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

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Organization: National Aeronautics and Space Administration