"Studying Active Galactic Nuclei with NASA's Wide-field Infrared"

 

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) launched into low-Earth orbit on 14 December 2009 and completed mapping the entire sky in four mid-infrared passbands six months later.  Although not one of its main goals, WISE has proven to be an extremely  effective platform for studying active galactic nuclei (AGN).  Extending approaches introduced for the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have developed techniques for selecting AGN using the  full-sky WISE data.  Simple mid-infrared criteria identify>60 robust AGN candidates per square degree, nearly triple the surface density of quasars from optical surveys such as Sloan, despite both WISE and Sloan being sensitive to sources of comparable luminosity.  The difference is that WISE identifies both obscured and unobscured AGN.  I will discuss the general properties of WISE-selected AGN using the deep data available in the COSMOS and NDWFS Bootes extragalactic fields, highlighting the inferred dust distribution in AGN.  In addition, the all-sky nature of WISE has allowed us to find some of the most rare, extreme obscured AGN in the universe.  I will present on-going work to study the AGN nature and evolution of a sample of hyper-luminous infrared galaxies found by the WISE satellite.  I will conclude by briefly discussing the recently launched NASA hard X-ray NuSTAR mission,  NuSTAR.  As part of it's two-year baseline mission, NuSTAR is planning to observe several WISE-selected obscured AGN candidates.