Swift-BAT: 157-Month All-Sky Hard X-Ray Source Catalog

February 2007 to December 2017 observations from the Swift observatory's Burst Alert Telescope. The catalog contains 1,891 hard X-ray sources in the 14-195 keV band, with 259 new detections, and classifies them into 17 astrophysical categories. Data reduction and analysis were conducted by NASA following established procedures from previous survey catalogs.

Use Cases

• Classifying hard X-ray sources based on the 17 reported astrophysical classes.
• Analyzing source detection significance and sensitivity across different sky coverage percentages.
• Studying temporal variability using derived lightcurves from snapshot and monthly images.
• Spectral analysis of sources using data from the 8 energy band channels.
• Cross-referencing catalog sources with external databases like NED and SIMBAD using provided counterpart coordinates.

Strengths

• Contains 1,891 sources with a reported sensitivity of 8.40 x 10^-12 erg/s/cm^2 over 90% of the sky.
• Provides detailed source classification into 17 distinct astrophysical types, with counts for each class.
• Data collection spans a long, uniform time baseline of 157 months with exposure times ranging from ~15 Ms to ~35 Ms.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Observations from the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) coded-mask imager on board the Swift observatory, processed into Detector Plane Histograms and mosaic images.

Time Range

February 2007 to December 2017

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 13 19:23:27.661322; freshness should be verified.

Geography

All-sky survey