The 70 Month Swift-BAT All-Sky Hard X-Ray Survey

TL;DR

This paper presents the Swift-BAT 70 month all-sky hard X-ray survey catalog, which detects over 1100 sources, primarily AGN, with improved sensitivity and uniformity over previous surveys, including spectral and lightcurve data.

Contribution

The paper introduces the most sensitive and uniform 70-month hard X-ray survey catalog with extensive spectral and temporal data for each detected source.

Findings

Detected 1171 sources in 14-195 keV band

Over 700 sources are active galactic nuclei (AGN)

Survey reaches flux sensitivity of 1.03e-11 erg/sec/cm2 over half the sky

Abstract

We present the catalog of sources detected in 70 months of observations of the BAT hard X-ray detector on the Swift gamma-ray burst observatory. The Swift-BAT 70 month survey has detected 1171 hard X-ray sources (more than twice as many sources as the previous 22 month survey) in the 14-195 keV band down to a significance level of 4.8 sigma, associated with 1210 counterparts. The 70 month Swift-BAT survey is the most sensitive and uniform hard X-ray all-sky survey and reaches a flux level of 1.03e-11 ergs/sec/cm2 over 50% of the sky and 1.34e-11 ergs/sec/cm2 over 90% of the sky. The majority of new sources in the 70 month survey continue to be AGN, with over 700 in the 70 month survey catalog. As part of this new edition of the Swift-BAT catalog, we also make available 8-channel spectra and monthly-sampled lightcurves for each object detected in the survey at the Swift-BAT 70 month website.