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Published June 20, 2009 | Published
Journal Article Open

The FIRST-2MASS Red Quasar Survey. II. An Anomalously High Fraction of LoBALs in Searches for Dust-Reddened Quasars

Abstract

We present results on a survey to find extremely dust-reddened Type 1 quasars. Combining the FIRST radio survey, the 2MASS Infrared Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we have selected a candidate list of 122 potential red quasars. With more than 80% spectroscopically identified objects, well over 50% are classified as dust-reddened Type 1 quasars, whose reddenings (E(B – V)) range from approximately 0.1 to 1.5 mag. They lie well off the color selection windows usually used to detect quasars and many fall within the stellar locus, which would have made it impossible to find these objects with traditional color selection techniques. The reddenings found are much more consistent with obscuration happening in the host galaxy rather than stemming from the dust torus. We find an unusually high fraction of broad absorption line (BAL) quasars at high redshift, all but one of them belonging to the low-ionization BAL (LoBAL) class and many also showing absorption in the metastable Fe II line (FeLoBAL). The discovery of further examples of dust-reddened LoBAL quasars provides more support for the hypothesis that BAL quasars (at least LoBAL quasars) represent an early stage in the lifetime of the quasar. The fact that we see such a high fraction of BALs could indicate that the quasar is in a young phase in which quasar feedback from the BAL winds is suppressing star formation in the host galaxy.

Additional Information

© 2009 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2008 February 22; accepted 2009 April 9; published 2009 May 27. The authors wish to thank Bryn Feldman for help with the first selections of this catalog and for help in carrying out the observations at Lick 3 m telescope. We are also thankful for the helpful comments from an anonymous referee on this paper. This work was partly performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract no. DE-AC52-07NA27344. This publication makes use of data products from the 2MASS, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation Funding for the SDSS has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, and the Max Planck Society.

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August 21, 2023
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