The NuSTAR extragalactic survey of the James Webb Space Telescope North Ecliptic Pole time-domain field
Alexander, D. M.; Cappelluti, N.; Gandhi, P.; Civano, F.; Elvis, M.; Lanzuisi, G.; Koekemoer, A.; Grogin, N. A.; Hickox, R. C.; Ward, M. J.; Rosario, D. J.; Willmer, C. N. A.; Masini, A.; Maksym, W. P.; Zhao, X.; Jansen, R. A.; Fornasini, F. M.; Windhorst, R. A.; Cohen, S. H.; Chen, C. T.
United States, United Kingdom, Italy
Abstract
We present the NuSTAR extragalactic survey of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) Time-Domain Field. The survey covers a ~0.16 deg2 area with a total exposure of 681 ks acquired in a total of nine observations from three epochs. The survey sensitivities at 20 per cent of the area are 2.39, 1.14, 2.76, 1.52, and 5.20 × 10-14 erg cm-2 s-1 in the 3-24, 3-8, 8-24, 8-16, and 16-24 keV bands, respectively. The NEP survey is one of the most sensitive extragalactic surveys with NuSTAR so far. A total of 33 sources were detected above 95 per cent reliability in at least one of the five bands. We present the number counts, logN-logS, measured in the hard X-ray 8-24 and 8-16 keV bands, uniquely accessible by NuSTAR down to such faint fluxes. We performed source detection on the XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of the same field to search for soft X-ray counterparts of each NuSTAR detection. The soft band positions were used to identify optical and infrared associations. We present the X-ray properties (hardness ratio and luminosity) and optical-to-X-ray properties of the detected sources. The measured fraction of candidate Compton-thick (N$\rm _H\ge 10^{24}\, cm^{-2}$) active galactic nuclei, derived from the hardness ratio, is between 3 and 27 per cent. As this survey was designed to have variability as its primary focus, we present preliminary results on multiepoch flux variability in the 3-24 keV band.