The BASS sample

As a result of the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS, pronounced like the fish, not the musical instrument), we now have access to the data from the Swift-BAT 105 Month Hard X-Ray survey. The most important thing that the BASS sample brings to the table is its completeness, because unlike surveys traditionally selecting AGNs using optical spectroscopy, this Hard X-Ray survey is not biased against the obscured AGNs that optical spectroscopy has a hard time detecting. This completeness in AGN subtype representation, along with being an all-sky survey, makes the BASS sample of around 1.1K AGNs an interesting prospect for scientific studies, including but not limited to diagnosing rare and/or abnormal AGNs, or exploring the relationship between AGNs and their host galaxies.

AGNs and their hosts

The study of the relationship between AGNs and their hosts is still an ongoing tale, and finding any sort of preference (or lack thereof) in host properties will help shed light in the mechanisms that favor (or hinder) nucleus activation in galaxies. In the case of this study, it aims at finding out whether or not the presence of certain morphological traits from the host can make it more prone to activating the nucleus, traits such as spiral arms, bars, merging, dust lanes, and more. In order to accomplish our goals, we need three things:

• A good sample of AGNs, provided by BASS
• Exposures for each of these galaxies, provided by DECaLS, PANSTARRS, SDSS and combined into color images by yours truly
• Confident morphological classifications, provided by you, the reader, and many like you

We've implemented a very similar workflow to the one used by the on-going Galaxy Zoo DECaLS project, and tweaked it a little bit in order to better suit our sample exclusively populated by AGNs. The goal is to get a lot of people to classify different galaxies and construct a confident classification for each of them, under the mentality that strength is in the numbers. Finally, we'll compare the AGN hosts from our sample with the galaxies classified in that project in order to see how these AGN hosts differ from the comparison sample.