First data release of the Burst Alert Telescope AGN legacy survey of molecular gas fueling in powerful nearby AGN

Published: 02 Feb 2022

The APEX telescope has obtained CO(2-1) spectra for a sample of 165 hard-X-Ray-selected AGN galaxies detected in observations by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard Swift. These observations, taken under the ESO programme id 198.A-0708, PI M. Koss, allow a statistical comparison of AGN and non-AGN dominated galaxies in the local Universe, for example from the ALLSMOG APEX survey. As this programme mainly aimed at observing a statistical sample of nearby AGN, many of the galaxies observed are well-known galaxies, and these Phase 3 data can provide a valuable total power measurement of the CO(2-1) emission which then  can be combined with interferometric observations obtained with ALMA. Additionally, the BASS (BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey) sample includes a variety of other ESO data products including hundreds of spectra with VLT/Xshooter, VLT/MUSE, and VLT/FORS2 with more information at the BASS survey website.

This BAT AGN release available via the Science Portal or programatically, makes the combined CO(2-1) spectra publicly available so users can derive further spectroscopic parameters, and compare them with other lines in these objects. The spectra either have a peak S/N>5 or reach depths of 0.5-2 mK rms for non-detections. Further details can be found in the data release paper by Koss et al. (2021) or in the accompanying release description.

Instructions on how to read or display data in the ESO/SDP tabular data format can be found in the 1D spectrum data format help page.