The Gaia–WISE Extragalactic Astrometric Catalog
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Date
2018-06-01
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Citation of Original Publication
Paine, Jennie, Jeremy Darling, and Alexandra Truebenbach. “The Gaia–WISE Extragalactic Astrometric Catalog.” The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 236, no. 2 (June 2018): 37. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/aabe2d.
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Abstract
The Gaia mission has detected a large number of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and galaxies, but these objects must be identified among the thousandfold more numerous stars. Extant astrometric AGN catalogs do not have the uniform sky coverage required to detect and characterize the all-sky, low-multipole proper motion signals produced by the barycenter motion, gravitational waves, and cosmological effects. To remedy this, we present an all-sky sample of 567,721 AGNs in Gaia Data Release 1, selected using WISE two-color criteria. The catalog has fairly uniform sky coverage beyond the Galactic plane, with a mean density of 12.8 AGNs per square degree. The objects have magnitudes ranging from G = 8.8 down to Gaia's magnitude limit, G = 20.7. The catalog is approximately 50% complete but suffers from low stellar contamination, roughly 0.2%. We predict that the end-of-mission Gaia proper motions for this catalog will enable detection of the secular aberration drift to high significance (23σ) and will place an upper limit on the anisotropy of the Hubble expansion of about 2%.