Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001aas...19913819m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 199th AAS Meeting, #138.19; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.1517
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
1
Scientific paper
In the ROSAT All-Sky Survey, an 80.7 deg2 region around the north ecliptic pole (NEP) constitutes the deepest observation of the X-ray sky ever achieved with such a large, contiguous solid angle. Here 445 unique sources are detected with fluxes measured at greater than 4σ significance. We have identified the physical nature of 443 (99.6%) of the ROSAT NEP X-ray sources through a comprehensive program of imaging and spectroscopy. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the dominant constituents comprising nearly half (49.0%) of the sample. The ROSAT NEP sample of 217 AGN is particularly well suited for a clustering analysis. The AGN are drawn from a contiguous, wide-angle region in the sky sampled to a relatively deep X-ray flux limit ( ~ 3 x 10-14 erg s-1 cm-2, 0.5 -- 2.0 keV). The AGN sample is essentially complete and we have spectroscopically measured redshifts for the entire sample. Furthermore, the survey selection function is well determined and only a function of X-ray flux. Finally, our low-redshift determination of the AGN correlation function complements the high-redshift results obtained for optically selected AGN. We have measured the degree of clustering in the ROSAT NEP AGN data by calculating the two-point spatial correlation function. The significance of the clustering signal (>3.5σ ) suggests these results are likely the best constraints reported so far for X-ray selected AGN. Our results indicate that X-ray luminous AGN are spatially clustered in a manner similar to that of normal galaxies and optically selected AGN (i.e., r0 ~ 6 h-1 Mpc). Furthermore, the NEP determination is a measure of the local behavior (z ~0.4) of AGN clustering and thus argues that the correlation strength has not evolved strongly since z ~ 1.4, the redshift typically probed by optical AGN correlation studies.
Boehringer Hans
Briel Ulrich G.
Gioia Isabella Maria
Henry Patrick J.
Huchra John P.
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