The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: the XMM-Newton X-ray source catalog and multi-band counterparts

TL;DR

This study presents an X-ray source catalog from the XMM-Newton observations of the SDSS-RM field, identifying thousands of sources, their optical/IR counterparts, and classifying a majority as AGN, enhancing multi-band astronomical surveys.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive X-ray catalog with reliable source detection and multi-band counterpart identification, integrating Bayesian methods and optical/IR data for the SDSS-RM field.

Findings

Catalog of 3553 X-ray sources with ~5% spurious fraction.

High AGN classification rate among SDSS-RM sources.

80% of SDSS-RM quasars are detectable in X-ray data.

Abstract

The XMM-RM project was designed to provide X-ray coverage of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) field. 41 XMM-Newton exposures, placed surrounding the Chandra AEGIS field, were taken, covering an area of 6.13 deg^2 and reaching a nominal exposure depth of ~15 ks. We present an X-ray catalog of 3553 sources detected in these data, using a PSF-fitting algorithm and a sample selection threshold that produces a ~5% fraction of spurious sources. In addition to the PSF-fitting likelihood, we calculate a second source reliability measure based on Poisson theory using source and background counts within an aperture. Using the Poissonian likelihood, we select a sub-sample with a high purity and find that it has similar number count profiles to previous X-ray surveys. The Bayesian method "NWAY" was employed to identify counterparts of the X-ray sources from the optical Legacy and the IR unWISE catalogs, using a 2-dimensional unWISE magnitude-color prior created from optical/IR counterparts of Chandra X-ray sources. A significant number of the optical/IR counterparts correspond to sources with low detection likelihoods, proving the value of retaining the low-likelihood detections in the catalog. 932 of the XMM-RM sources are covered by SDSS spectroscopic observations. 89% of them are classified as AGN, and 71% of these AGN are in the SDSS-RM quasar catalog. Among the SDSS-RM quasars, 80% are detectable at the depth of the XMM observations.