The Extragalactic Serendipitous Swift Survey (ExSeSS) - I. Survey definition and measurements of the X-ray number counts

We present the Extragalactic Serendipitous Swift Survey (ExSeSS), providing a new well-defined sample constructed from the observations performed using the Swift X-ray Telescope. The ExSeSS sample consists of 79 342 sources detected in the medium (1-2 keV), hard (2-10 keV), or total (0.3-10 keV) energy bands, covering 2086.6 deg² of sky across a flux range of f_{0.3-10 keV} ~ 10^-15 - 10^-10 erg s^-1 cm^-2. Using the new ExSeSS sample we present measurements of the differential number counts of X-ray sources as a function of 2-10 keV flux that trace the population of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) in a previously unexplored regime. We find that taking the line-of-sight absorption column density into account has an effect on the differential number count measurements and is vital to obtain agreement with previous results. In the hard band, we obtain a good agreement between the ExSeSS measurements and previous, higher energy data from NuSTAR and Swift/BAT when taking into account the varying column density of the ExSeSS sample as well as the X-ray spectral parameters of each of the samples we are comparing to. We also find discrepancies between the ExSeSS measurements and AGN population synthesis models, indicating a change in the properties of the AGN population over this flux range that is not fully described by current models at these energies, hinting at a larger, moderately obscured population at low redshifts (z ≲ 0.2) that the models are not currently taking into account.