The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging

Schlafly, Edward F.; Meisner, Aaron M.; Green, Gregory M.

doi:10.3847/1538-4365/aafbea

Title: The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging

Journal Article · 05 February 2019 · The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/aafbea · OSTI ID:1544091

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Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), Tuscon, AZ (United States)
Stanford Univ., CA (United States)

We introduce the unWISE Catalog, containing the positions and fluxes of roughly 2 billion objects observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) over the full sky. The unWISE Catalog has two advantages over the existing WISE catalog (AllWISE): first, it is based on increasingly deeper imaging, and second, it features improved modeling of crowded regions. The deeper imaging used in the unWISE Catalog comes from the coaddition of all publicly available 3–5 μm WISE imaging, including that from the ongoing NEOWISE-reactivation mission, thus increasing the total exposure time by a factor of 5 relative to AllWISE. At these depths, even at high Galactic latitudes, many sources are blended with their neighbors; accordingly, the unWISE analysis simultaneously fits thousands of sources to obtain accurate photometry. Our new catalog detects sources roughly 0.7 magnitudes fainter than the AllWISE catalog at 5σ, and more accurately models millions of faint sources in the Galactic plane, enabling a wealth of Galactic and extragalactic science. In particular, relative to AllWISE, unWISE doubles the number of galaxies detected between redshifts 0 and 1 and triples the number between redshifts 1 and 2, cataloging more than half a billion galaxies over the whole sky.

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Research Organization:: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC); Univ. of California, Oakland, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP) (SC-25)

Grant/Contract Number:: AC02-05CH11231

OSTI ID:: 1544091

Journal Information:: The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online), Journal Name: The Astrophysical Journal. Supplement Series (Online) Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 240; ISSN 1538-4365

Publisher:: American Astronomical Society/IOPCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Title: The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging

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