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Register a new userOptically variable active galactic nuclei in the 3 yr VST survey of the COSMOS field
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The analysis of the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at different wavelengths and the study of possible correlations among different spectral windows are nowadays a major field of inquiry. Optical variability has been largely used to identify AGNs in multivisit surveys. The strength of a selection based on optical variability lies in the chance to analyze data from surveys of large sky areas by ground-based telescopes. However the effectiveness of optical variability selection, with respect to other multiwavelength techniques, has been poorly studied down to the depth expected from next generation surveys. Here we present the results of our r-band analysis of a sample of 299 optically variable AGN candidates in the VST survey of the COSMOS field, counting 54 visits spread over three observing seasons spanning > 3 yr. This dataset is > 3 times larger in size than the one presented in our previous analysis (De Cicco et al. 2015), and the observing baseline is ~8 times longer. We push towards deeper magnitudes (r(AB) ~23.5 mag) compared to past studies; we make wide use of ancillary multiwavelength catalogs in order to confirm the nature of our AGN candidates, and constrain the accuracy of the method based on spectroscopic and photometric diagnostics. We also perform tests aimed at assessing the relevance of dense sampling in view of future wide-field surveys. We demonstrate that the method allows the selection of high-purity (> 86%) samples. We take advantage of the longer observing baseline to achieve great improvement in the completeness of our sample with respect to X-ray and spectroscopically confirmed samples of AGNs (59%, vs. ~15% in our previous work), as well as in the completeness of unobscured and obscured AGNs. The effectiveness of the method confirms the importance to develop future, more refined techniques for the automated analysis of larger datasets.
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Optical variability has proven to be an effective way of detecting AGNs in imaging surveys, lasting from weeks to years. In the present work we test its use as a tool to identify AGNs in the VST multi-epoch survey of the COSMOS field, originally tailored to detect supernova events. We make use of the multi-wavelength data provided by other COSMOS surveys to discuss the reliability of the method and the nature of our AGN candidates. Our selection returns a sample of 83 AGN candidates; based on a number of diagnostics, we conclude that 67 of them are confirmed AGNs (81% purity), 12 are classified as supernovae, while the nature of the remaining 4 is unknown. For the subsample of AGNs with some spectroscopic classification, we find that Type 1 are prevalent (89%) compared to Type 2 AGNs (11%). Overall, our approach is able to retrieve on average 15% of all AGNs in the field identified by means of spectroscopic or X-ray classification, with a strong dependence on the source apparent magnitude. In particular, the completeness for Type 1 AGNs is 25%, while it drops to 6% for Type 2 AGNs. The rest of the X-ray selected AGN population presents on average a larger r.m.s. variability than the bulk of non variable sources, indicating that variability detection for at least some of these objects is prevented only by the photometric accuracy of the data. We show how a longer observing baseline would return a larger sample of AGN candidates. Our results allow us to assess the usefulness of this AGN selection technique in view of future wide-field surveys.
The survey of the COSMOS field by the VLT Survey Telescope is an appealing testing ground for variability studies of active galactic nuclei (AGN). With 54 r-band visits over 3.3 yr and a single-visit depth of 24.6 r-band mag, the dataset is also particularly interesting in the context of performance forecasting for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). This work is the fifth in a series dedicated to the development of an automated, robust, and efficient methodology to identify optically variable AGN, aimed at deploying it on future LSST data. We test the performance of a random forest (RF) algorithm in selecting optically variable AGN candidates, investigating how the use of different AGN labeled sets (LSs) and features sets affects this performance. We define a heterogeneous AGN LS and choose a set of variability features and optical and near-infrared colors based on what can be extracted from LSST data. We find that an AGN LS that includes only Type I sources allows for the selection of a highly pure (91%) sample of AGN candidates, obtaining a completeness with respect to spectroscopically confirmed AGN of 69% (vs. 59% in our previous work). The addition of colors to variability features mildly improves the performance of the RF classifier, while colors alone prove less effective than variability in selecting AGN as they return contaminated samples of candidates and fail to identify most host-dominated AGN. We observe that a bright (r < 21 mag) AGN LS is able to retrieve candidate samples not affected by the magnitude cut, which is of great importance as faint AGN LSs for LSST-related studies will be hard to find and likely imbalanced. We estimate a sky density of 6.2 million AGN for the LSST main survey down to our current magnitude limit.
Identifying the source population of ionizing radiation, responsible for the reionization of the universe, is currently a hotly debated subject with conflicting results. Studies of faint, high-redshift star-forming galaxies, in most cases, fail to detect enough escaping ionizing radiation to sustain the process. Recently, the capacity of bright quasi-stellar objects to ionize their surrounding medium has been confirmed also for faint active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which were found to display an escaping fraction of ~74% at z~4. Such levels of escaping radiation could sustain the required UV background, given the number density of faint AGNs is adequate. Thus, it is mandatory to accurately measure the luminosity function of faint AGNs (L~L*) in the same redshift range. For this reason we have conducted a spectroscopic survey, using the wide field spectrograph IMACS at the 6.5m Baade Telescope, to determine the nature of our sample of faint AGN candidates in the COSMOS field. This sample was assembled using photometric redshifts, color, and X-ray information. We ended up with 16 spectroscopically confirmed AGNs at 3.6<z<4.2 down to a magnitude of i$_{AB}$=23.0 for an area of 1.73 deg$^{2}$. This leads to an AGN space density of ~1.6$times10^{-6} Mpc^{-3}$ (corrected) at z~4 for an absolute magnitude of M$_{1450}$=-23.5. This is higher than previous measurements and seems to indicate that AGNs could make a substantial contribution to the ionizing background at z~4. Assuming that AGN physical parameters remain unchanged at higher redshifts and fainter luminosities, these sources could be regarded as the main drivers of cosmic reionization.
As the SKA is expected to be operational in the next decade, investigations of the radio sky in the range of 100 MHz to 10 GHz have become important for simulations of the SKA observations. In determining physical properties of galaxies from radio data, the radio SED is often assumed to be described by a simple power law, usually with a spectral index of 0.7 for all sources. Even though radio SEDs have been shown to exhibit deviations from this assumption, both in differing spectral indices and complex spectral shapes, it is often presumed that their individual differences cancel out in large samples. We constructed the average radio SED of radio-excess active galactic nuclei (RxAGN), defined as those that exhibit a 3 $sigma$ radio luminosity excess with respect to the value expected only from contribution from star formation, out to z~4. We combined VLA observations of the COSMOS field at 1.4 GHz and 3 GHz with GMRT observations at 325 MHz and 610 MHz. To account for nondetections in the GMRT maps, we employed the survival analysis technique. We selected a sample of RxAGN out to z~4. We find that a sample of RxAGN can be described by a spectral index of $alpha_1=0.28pm0.03$ below the break frequency $ u_b=(4.1pm0.2)$ GHz and $alpha_2=1.16pm0.04$ above, while a simple power-law model yields a single spectral index of $alpha=0.64pm0.07$. By binning in 1.4 GHz radio luminosity and redshift, we find that the power-law spectral index, as well as broken power-law spectral indices, may increase for larger source sizes, while the power-law spectral index and lower-frequency (<4 GHz) broken power-law spectral index are additionally positively correlated with redshift.
We present a detailed spectral analysis of point-like X-ray sources in the XMM-COSMOS field. Our sample of 135 sources only includes those that have more than 100 net counts in the 0.3-10 keV energy band and have been identified through optical spectroscopy. The majority of the sources are well described by a simple power-law model with either no absorption (76%) or a significant intrinsic, absorbing column (20%).As expected, the distribution of intrinsic absorbing column densities is markedly different between AGN with or without broad optical emission lines. We find within our sample four Type-2 QSOs candidates (L_X > 10^44 erg/s, N_H > 10^22 cm^-2), with a spectral energy distribution well reproduced by a composite Seyfert-2 spectrum, that demonstrates the strength of the wide field XMM/COSMOS survey to detect these rare and underrepresented sources.
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