THE 60 MONTH ALL-SKY BURST ALERT TELESCOPE SURVEY OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS AND THE ANISOTROPY OF NEARBY AGNs

Surveys above 10 keV represent one of the best resources to provide an unbiased census of the population of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We present the results of 60 months of observation of the hard X-ray sky with Swift/Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). In this time frame, BAT-detected (in the 15-55 keV band) 720 sources in an all-sky survey of which 428 are associated with AGNs, most of which are nearby. Our sample has negligible incompleteness and statistics a factor of ∼2 larger over similarly complete sets of AGNs. Our sample contains (at least) 15 bona fide Compton-thick AGNs and 3 likely candidates. Compton-thick AGNs represent ∼5% of AGN samples detected above 15 keV. We use the BAT data set to refine the determination of the log N-log S of AGNs which is extremely important, now that NuSTAR prepares for launch, toward assessing the AGN contribution to the cosmic X-ray background. We show that the log N-log S of AGNs selected above 10 keV is now established to ∼10% precision. We derive the luminosity function of Compton-thick AGNs and measure a space density of 7.9+4.1–2.9 × 10–5 Mpc–3 for objects with a de-absorbed luminosity larger than 2 × 1042 erg s–1. As the BAT AGNs are all mostly local, they allow us to investigate the spatial distribution of AGNs in the nearby universe regardless of absorption. We find concentrations of AGNs that coincide spatially with the largest congregations of matter in the local (≤85 Mpc) universe. There is some evidence that the fraction of Seyfert 2 objects is larger than average in the direction of these dense regions.