The eROSITA Final Equatorial-Depth Survey (eFEDS): The AGN catalog and its X-ray spectral properties

• Published in: Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin) 2022-05, Vol.661, p.A5
• Main Authors: Liu, Teng, Buchner, Johannes, Nandra, Kirpal, Merloni, Andrea, Dwelly, Tom, Sanders, Jeremy S., Salvato, Mara, Arcodia, Riccardo, Brusa, Marcella, Wolf, Julien, Georgakakis, Antonis, Boller, Thomas, Krumpe, Mirko, Lamer, Georg, Waddell, Sophia, Urrutia, Tanya, Schwope, Axel, Robrade, Jan, Wilms, Jörn, Dauser, Thomas, Comparat, Johan, Toba, Yoshiki, Ichikawa, Kohei, Iwasawa, Kazushi, Shen, Yue, Medel, Hector Ibarra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: active galaxies; ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS; galactic nuclei; quasars; surveys; x-rays
• ISSN: 0004-6361; 1432-0746
• DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202141643

Context. The eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS), observed with eROSITA ahead of its planned 4-yr all-sky survey, is the largest contiguous-field X-ray survey at present. It yielded a large sample of X-ray sources with very rich multiband photometric and spectroscopic coverage. Aims. We present here the eFEDS active galactic nuclei (AGN) catalog and the eROSITA X-ray spectral properties of the eFEDS sources. Methods. Using a Bayesian method, we performed a systematic X-ray spectral analysis for all the eFEDS sources. We adopted multiple spectral models, including single-component power-law or hot-plasma models and double-component models of a power law plus soft excess. We investigated the capacity of eROSITA X-ray spectra for constraining AGN spectral shapes through a detailed analysis of the posterior parameter probability distribution functions. Hierarchical Bayesian modeling was used to recover the spectral parameter distribution of the sample. The source fluxes and luminosities were measured from the posterior of the spectral fitting. Results. The eFEDS AGN catalog (22 079 sources) comprises ~80% of the eFEDS point sources. Despite a large number of faint sources, our spectral fitting provides reasonable measurements of spectral shapes and intrinsic luminosities for a majority of the sources. Because of sample selection bias, this AGN catalog is dominated by X-ray unobscured sources, with an obscured (log N H > 21.5) fraction of 8%; the power-law emission of the hot corona is also relatively soft, with a typical slope of 2.0. For type-I AGN, the X-ray emission is well correlated with the UV emission with the usual anticorrelation between the X-ray to UV spectral slope α OX and the UV luminosity. The X-ray spectral properties measured with various models are presented for all the eFEDS sources.