The Extragalactic Serendipitous Swift Survey (ExSeSS) -- I. Survey definition and measurements of the X-ray number counts

TL;DR

The ExSeSS survey provides a comprehensive X-ray source catalog and measures the number counts of AGN across a wide flux range, revealing discrepancies with existing models and suggesting a larger obscured AGN population at low redshifts.

Contribution

This work introduces a new, well-defined X-ray source sample from Swift, measures differential number counts, and compares them with models, highlighting the need to account for obscured AGN populations.

Findings

Good agreement with previous high-energy data when accounting for absorption.

Discrepancies with AGN population models suggest missing obscured sources.

Indicates a larger, moderately obscured AGN population at low redshifts.

Abstract

We present the Extragalactic Serendipitous Swift Survey (ExSeSS), providing a new well-defined sample constructed from the observations performed using the Swift X-ray Telescope. The ExSeSS sample consists of 79,342 sources detected in the medium (1-2 keV), hard (2-10 keV) or total (0.3-10 keV) energy bands, covering 2086.6 deg$^{2}$ of sky across a flux range of $f_\mathrm{0.3-10keV}\sim10^{-15}-10^{-10}$ erg s$^{-1}$ cm$^{-2}$. Using the new ExSeSS sample we present measurements of the differential number counts of X-ray sources as a function of 2-10 keV flux that trace the population of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in a previously unexplored regime. We find that taking the line-of-sight absorption column density into account has an effect on the differential number count measurements and is vital to obtain agreement with previous results. In the hard band, we obtain a good agreement between the ExSeSS measurements and previous, higher energy data from NuSTAR and Swift/BAT when taking into account the varying column density of the ExSeSS sample as well as the X-ray spectral parameters of each of the samples we are comparing to. We also find discrepancies between the ExSeSS measurements and AGN population synthesis models, indicating a change in the properties of the AGN population over this flux range that is not fully described by current models at these energies, hinting at a larger, moderately obscured population at low redshifts ($z\lesssim0.2$) that the models are not currently taking into account.