The invisible AGN catalogue

The existence of this large population of dust-obscured, infrared (IR)-bright AGN is predicted by models of galaxy-supermassive black hole coevolution and is required to explain the observed X-ray and IR backgrounds. Recently, IR colour cuts with Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer have identified a portion of this missing population.

However, as the host galaxy brightness relative to that of the AGN increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between IR emission originating from the AGN and from its host galaxy. As a solution, we have developed a new method to select obscured AGN using their 20-cm continuum emission to identify the objects as AGN. We created the resulting invisible AGN catalogue by selecting objects that are detected in AllWISE (mid-IR) and FIRST (20 cm), but are not detected in SDSS (optical) or 2MASS (near-IR), producing a final catalogue of 46 258 objects. 30 per cent of the objects are selected by existing selection methods, while the remaining 70 per cent represent a potential previously unidentified population of candidate AGN that are missed by mid-IR colour cuts.