A first catalogue of automatically selected ultraviolet-excess sources from the UVEX survey

Abstract

We present the first catalogue of point-source ultraviolet (UV)-excess sources selected from the UV-Excess Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (UVEX). UVEX images the Northern Galactic Plane in the U,g,r and bands in the Galactic latitude range -5° < b < +5°. Through an automated algorithm, which works on a field-to-field basis, we select blue UV-excess sources in 211 square degrees from the (U-g) versus (g-r) colour-colour diagram and the g versus (U-g) and g versus (g-r) colour-magnitude diagrams. The UV-excess catalogue covers the magnitude range 14 < g < 22.5, contains 2170 sources and consists of a mix of white dwarfs, post-common-envelope objects, interacting binaries, quasars and active galactic nuclei. Two other samples of outliers were found during the selection: (i) a 'subdwarf' sample, consisting of no less than 9872 candidate metal-poor stars or lightly reddened main-sequence stars, and (ii) a 'purple' sample consisting of 803 objects, most likely a mix of reddened late M giants, T Tauri stars, planetary nebulae, symbiotic stars and carbon stars. Cross-matching the selected UV-excess catalogue with other catalogues aids with the first classification of the different populations and shows that more than 99 per cent of our selected sources are unidentified sources. © 2011 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.