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  • Open Universe survey of Swi...
    Giommi, P.; Chang, Y. L.; Turriziani, S.; Glauch, T.; Leto, C.; Verrecchia, F.; Padovani, P.; Penacchioni, A. V.; Arneodo, F.; Barres de Almeida, U.; Brandt, C. H.; Capalbi, M.; Civitarese, O.; D’Elia, V.; Di Giovanni, A.; De Angelis, M.; Del Rio Vera, J.; Di Pippo, S.; Middei, R.; Perri, M.; Pollock, A. M. T.; Puccetti, S.; Ricard, N.; Ruffini, R.; Sahakyan, N.

    Astronomy & astrophysics, 10/2020, Volume: 642
    Journal Article

    Aims. The sample of serendipitous sources detected in all Swift -XRT images pointing at gamma ray bursts (GRBs) constitutes the largest existing medium-deep survey of the X-ray sky. To build such dataset we analysed all Swift X-ray images centred on GRBs and observed over a period of 15 years using automatic tools that do not require any expertise in X-ray astronomy. Besides presenting a new large X-ray survey and a complete sample of blazars, this work aims to be a step in the direction of achieving the ultimate goal of the Open Universe Initiative, which is to enable non-expert people to benefit fully from space science data, possibly extending the potential for scientific discovery, which is currently confined within a small number of highly specialised teams, to a much larger population. Methods. We used the Swift _deepsky Docker container encapsulated pipeline to build the largest existing flux-limited and unbiased sample of serendipitous X-ray sources. Swift _deepsky runs on any laptop or desktop computer with a modern operating system. The tool automatically downloads the data and the calibration files from the archives, runs the official Swift analysis software, and produces a number of results including images, the list of detected sources, X-ray fluxes, spectral energy distribution data, and spectral slope estimations. Results. We used our source list to build the LogN-LogS of extra-galactic sources, which perfectly matches that estimated by other satellites. Combining our survey with multi-frequency data, we selected a complete radio-flux-density-limited sample of high energy peaked blazars (HBL). The LogN-LogS built with this data set confirms that previous samples are incomplete below ∼20 mJy.