A Uniformly Selected, All-Sky Optical AGN catalog, for UHECR Correlation

Abstract

Studies discerning whether there is a significant correlation between UHECR arrival directions and optical AGN are hampered by the lack of a uniformly selected and complete all-sky optical AGN catalog. To remedy this, we are preparing such a catalog based on the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS), a spectroscopic sample of $\sim 44,500$ galaxies complete to a K magnitude of 11.75 over 91% of the sky. We have analyzed the available optical spectra of these 2MRS galaxies ($\sim 80$% of the galaxies), in order to identify the AGN amongst them with uniform criteria. We present a first-stage release of the AGN catalog for the southern sky, based on spectra from the 6dF Galaxy survey and CTIO telescope. Providing a comparably uniform and complete catalog for the northern sky is more challenging because the spectra for the northern galaxies were taken with different instruments.