THE SWIFT X-RAY TELESCOPE CLUSTER SURVEY. III. CLUSTER CATALOG FROM 2005-2012 ARCHIVAL DATA
- CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, Anhui (China)
- INAF, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Firenze, Largo Enrico Fermi 5, I-50125 Firenze (Italy)
- INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via Brera 28, I-20121 Milano (Italy)
- Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Dipartimento di Fisica e Scienze della Terra, Via Saragat 1, I-44121 Ferrara (Italy)
- INAF, Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via Bianchi 46, I-23807 Merate (Italy)
- Department of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, LGRT-B 619E, 710 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA (United States)
We present the Swift X-ray Cluster Survey (SWXCS) catalog obtained using archival data from the X-ray telescope (XRT) on board the Swift satellite acquired from 2005 February to 2012 November, extending the first release of the SWXCS. The catalog provides positions, soft fluxes, and, when possible, optical counterparts for a flux-limited sample of X-ray group and cluster candidates. We consider the fields with Galactic latitude |b| > 20° to avoid high H I column densities. We discard all of the observations targeted at groups or clusters of galaxies, as well as particular extragalactic fields not suitable to search for faint extended sources. We finally select ∼3000 useful fields covering a total solid angle of ∼400 deg{sup 2}. We identify extended source candidates in the soft-band (0.5-2 keV) images of these fields using the software EXSdetect, which is specifically calibrated for the XRT data. Extensive simulations are used to evaluate contamination and completeness as a function of the source signal, allowing us to minimize the number of spurious detections and to robustly assess the selection function. Our catalog includes 263 candidate galaxy clusters and groups down to a flux limit of 7 × 10{sup –15} erg cm{sup –2} s{sup –1} in the soft band, and the logN-logS is in very good agreement with previous deep X-ray surveys. The final list of sources is cross-correlated with published optical, X-ray, and Sunyaev-Zeldovich catalogs of clusters. We find that 137 sources have been previously identified as clusters in the literature in independent surveys, while 126 are new detections. Currently, we have collected redshift information for 158 sources (60% of the entire sample). Once the optical follow-up and the X-ray spectral analysis of the sources are complete, the SWXCS will provide a large and well-defined catalog of groups and clusters of galaxies to perform statistical studies of cluster properties and tests of cosmological models.
- OSTI ID:
- 22340097
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Vol. 216, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0067-0049
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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