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WISE/2MASS/RASS (W2R) AGN Sample Catalog

Metadata Updated: February 6, 2026

The authors of this catalog have developed the S<sub>IX</sub> statistic to identify bright, highly likely active galactic nucleus (AGN) candidates solely on the basis of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), and ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS) data. This statistic was optimized with data from the preliminary WISE survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and tested with Lick 3 m Kast spectroscopy. The authors find that sources with S<sub>IX</sub> < 0 have a >~ 95% likelihood of being an AGN (defined in this paper as a Seyfert 1, quasar, or blazar). This statistic was then applied to the full WISE/2MASS/RASS dataset, including the final WISE data release, to yield the "W2R" sample of 4316 sources with S<sub>IX</sub> < 0. Only 2209 of these sources are currently in the Veron-Cetty and Veron (VCV) Catalog of spectroscopically confirmed AGNs, indicating that the W2R sample contains nearly 2000 new, relatively bright (J <~ 16) AGNs. The authors utilize the W2R sample to quantify biases and incompleteness in the VCV Catalog. They find that it is highly complete for bright (J < 14), northern AGNs, but the completeness drops below 50% for fainter, southern samples and for sources near the Galactic plane. This approach also led to the spectroscopic identification of 10 new AGNs in the Kepler field, more than doubling the number of AGNs being monitored by Kepler. The W2R sample contains better than 1 bright AGN every 10 deg<sup>2</sup>, permitting construction of AGN samples in any sufficiently large region of sky. This table contains the 4316 sources comprising the W2R sample. This table was created by the HEASARC in June 2012 based on an electronic version of Table 3 from the reference paper which was obtained from the ApJ website. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date February 6, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date February 6, 2026
Publisher High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
Maintainer
Identifier ivo://nasa.heasarc/w2ragncat
Data Last Modified 2026-02-03
Category Astrophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id cc8af4dd-13f8-4f26-a26a-c18fbfc1e076
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/w2ragncat.html
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 5cff004d1a725985cb843f77365fd6eaecf8b19eface99981e583e5f197136c9
Source Schema Version 1.1

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