English

The XXL Survey: VI. The 1000 brightest X-ray point sources

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2016-06-15 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

X-ray extragalactic surveys are ideal laboratories for the study of the evolution and clustering of active galactic nuclei (AGN). The XXL Survey spans two fields of a combined 50 deg2deg^2 observed for more than 6Ms with XMM-Newton, occupying the parameter space between deep surveys and very wide area surveys; at the same time it benefits from a wealth of ancillary data. This paper marks the first release of the XXL point source catalogue selected in the 2-10 keV energy band with limiting flux F210keV=4.81014ergs1cm2F_{2-10keV}=4.8\cdot10^{-14}\rm{erg\,s^{-1}\,cm^{-2}}. We use both public and proprietary data sets to identify the counterparts of the X-ray point-like sources and improved upon the photometric redshift determination for AGN by applying a Random Forest classification trained to identify for each object the optimal photometric redshift model library. We also assign a probability to each source to be a star or an outlier. We model with Bayesian analysis the X-ray spectra assuming a power-law model with the presence of an absorbing medium. We find an average unabsorbed photon index of Γ=1.85\Gamma=1.85 and average hydrogen column density logNH=21.07cm2\log{N_{H}}=21.07 cm^{-2}. We find no trend of Γ\Gamma or NHN_H with redshift and a fraction of 26% absorbed sources (logNH>22\log N_{H}>22). We show that the XXL-1000-AGN number counts extended the number counts of the COSMOS survey to higher fluxes and are fully consistent with the Euclidean expectation. We constrain the intrinsic luminosity function of AGN in the 2-10 keV energy band where the unabsorbed X-ray flux is estimated from the X-ray spectral fit up to z=3. Finally, we demonstrate the presence of a supercluster size structure at redshift 0.14, identified by means of percolation analysis of the XXL-1000-AGN sample. The XXL survey, reaching a medium flux limit and covering a wide area is a stepping stone between current deep fields and planned wide area surveys.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1603.03240,
  title  = {The XXL Survey: VI. The 1000 brightest X-ray point sources},
  author = {S. Fotopoulou and F. Pacaud and S. Paltani and P. Ranalli and M. E. Ramos-Ceja and L. Faccioli and M. Plionis and C. Adami and A. Bongiorno and M. Brusa and L. Chiappetti and S. Desai and A. Elyiv and C. Lidman and O. Melnyk and M. Pierre and E. Piconcelli and C. Vignali and S. Alis and F. Ardila and S. Arnouts and I. Baldry and M. Bremer and D. Eckert and L. Guennou and C. Horellou and A. Iovino and E. Koulouridis and J. Liske and S. Maurogordato and F. Menanteau and J. J. Mohr and M. Owers and B. Poggianti and E. Pompei and T. Sadibekova and A. Stanford and R. Tuffs and J. Willis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.03240},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

29 pages, 20 figures, 120 figures in the appendix, accepted for publication in A&A