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Swift Serendipitous Survey in Deep XRT GRB Fields (SwiftFT)

Metadata Updated: April 10, 2026

This table contains the SwiftFT catalog of point sources detected by the X-ray Telescope (XRT) on board the Swift satellite in observations centered on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) during the first four years of operation (Jan 2005 - Dec 2008). Swift is a NASA mission with international participation dedicated to the gamma-ray burst study. It carries three instruments. The BAT is the large field of view instrument and operates in the 10-300 keV energy band; and two narrow field instruments, XRT and UVOT, that operate in the X-ray and UV/optical regime, respectively. The catalog was derived including pointing positions of the 374 fields centered on the GRBs covering a total area of ~32.55 square degrees. Since GRBs are distributed randomly in the sky, the survey covers totally unrelated parts of the sky, and is highly uniform courtesy of the XRT's stable point spread function and small vignetting correction factors. The observations for a particular field were merged together and the source search analysis was restricted to a circular area of 10 arcmin radius centered in the median of the individual observation aim points. The total exposure considering all the fields is of 36.8 Ms, with ~32% of the fields having more than 100 ks exposure time, and ~28% with exposure time in the range 50-100 ks. The catalog was generated by running the detection algorithm in the XIMAGE package version 4.4.1 that locates the point sources using a sliding-cell method. The average background intensity is estimated in several small square boxes uniformly located within the image. The position and intensity of each detected source are calculated in a box whose size maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio. The detect algorithm was run separately in the following three energy bands: 0.3-3 (Soft), 2-10 (Hard), and 0.3-10 (Full) keV. For each detections the three count rates in the soft, hard, and full bands are all corrected for dead times and vignetting using exposure maps and for the PSF. Hardness ratios are calculated using the three energy band and defined as HR = (c<sub>H</sub> - c<sub>S</sub>)/(c<sub>H</sub> + c<sub>S</sub>) where c<sub>S</sub> and c<sub>H</sub> are the count rates in the S(oft) and H(ard) bands, respectively. The catalog was cleaned of spurious and extended sources by visual inspection of all the observations. Count rates in the three bands were converted into flux in the 0.5-10, 0.5-2, and 2-10 keV energy bands, respectively. The flux was estimated using a power law spectrum with photon spectral index of 1.8 and a Galactic N<sub>H</sub> of 3.3 x 10<sup>20</sup> cm<sup>-2</sup>. Each row in the catalog is a unique source. The detections from the soft, hard, and full bands were merged into a single catalog using a matching radius of 6 arcsec and retaining detection with a significance level of being spurious <= 2 x 10<sup>-5</sup> in at least one band. There are 9387 total entries in the catalog. The SWIFTFT acronym honors both the Swift satellite and the memory of Francesca Tamburelli who made numerous crucial contributions to the development of the Swift-XRT data reduction software. This database table was created by the HEASARC in November 2021 based on the electronic version available from the ASI Data Center <a href="https://www.asdc.asi.it/xrtgrbdeep_cat/">https://www.asdc.asi.it/xrtgrbdeep_cat/</a>; and published in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Journal. This catalog is also available as the <a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/528/A122">CDS catalog J/A+A/528/A122</a>. The HEASARC added the source_number parameter, a counter to numerically identify each source in the catalog, as well as Galactic coordinates and changed the source name from SWIFTFTJHHMMSS.s+DDMM.m to SWIFTFT JHHMMSS.s+DDMM.m, adding a space between the catalog prefix and the formatted J2000 coordinates. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2026
Publisher High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
Maintainer
Identifier ivo://nasa.heasarc/swiftft
Data Last Modified 2026-04-06
Category Astrophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 7ac4dfd0-19d8-4a57-ade6-d34b8e64f4e3
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL ivo://nasa.heasarc/swiftft
License https://www.usa.gov/government-works
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 0b771227025f0e04b00f72c89de1aff5f5fd4ecec597c1de27a82843a4459c0f
Source Schema Version 1.1

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