Spectroscopic identifications of Spitzer sources in the SWIRE/XMM-NEWTON/ELAIS-S1 field: a large fraction of Active Galactic Nuclei with high F(24micron)/F(R) ratio

TL;DR

This study provides a large spectroscopic catalog of Spitzer sources in the ELAIS-S1 field, revealing that the fraction of AGN increases with higher mid-infrared to optical flux ratios, and introduces a color-color diagram to distinguish AGN types.

Contribution

It offers the first direct optical spectroscopic evidence linking AGN fraction to mid-infrared/optical flux ratios and presents a new IRAC-MIPS color-color diagram for AGN classification.

Findings

AGN fraction reaches 70% at high F(24 micron)/F(R) ratios.

The AGN fraction at 0.8 mJy is approximately 22%.

A new IRAC-MIPS color-color diagram effectively separates AGN types.

Abstract

We present a catalog of optical spectroscopic identifications of sources detected by Spitzer at 3.6 or 24 micron down to 10 and 280 microJy, respectively, in the SWIRE/XMM-Newton/ELAIS-S1 field and classified via line width analysis and diagnostic diagrams. A total of 1376 sources down to R~24.2 mag have been identified (1362 detected at 3.6 micron, 419 at 24 micron, and 405 at both) by low-resolution optical spectroscopy carried out with FORS2, VIMOS, and EFOSC2 at the Very Large Telescope and 3.6m ESO telescopes. The spectroscopic campaigns have been carried out over the central 0.6 square degrees area of ELAIS-S1 which, in particular, has also been observed by XMM-Newton and Chandra. We find the first direct optical spectroscopic evidence that the fraction of active galactic nuclei (AGN; mostly AGN2) increases with increasing F(24 micron)/F(R) ratio, reaching values of 70(+/-20)% in the range 316<F(24 micron)F(R)<1000. We present an IRAC-MIPS color-color diagram able to separate AGN1 from obscured AGN2 candidates. After having corrected for the spectroscopic incompleteness of our sample, it results that the AGN fraction at F(24 micron)=0.8 mJy is ~22(+/-7)% and decreases slowly to ~19(+/-5)% down to F(24 micron)=0.3 mJy.