Quasars in the COSMOS Field
Abstract
We obtained medium-resolution spectra of 336 quasar candidates in the COSMOS HST Treasury field using the MMT 6.5 m telescope and the Hectospec multiobject spectrograph. Candidates were drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR1 catalog using quasar flags set by the SDSS multicolor quasar target selection algorithm. In this paper we present our discovery spectra from 1.39 deg2 (69.5% of the COSMOS field) and a discussion of the selection method and yields. We confirmed 95 quasars, including at least two BAL quasars; 80 of these are new quasars that do not appear in previous quasar confirmation follow-up studies. The candidates additionally included 184 compact emission-line galaxies, a third of which are likely type 2 AGNs, and 12 stars. The quasars span a range in magnitude of 18.3 < g < 22.5 and a range in redshift of 0.2 < z < 2.3. Our results are consistent with a lower limit quasar surface density from SDSS color selection of 102 deg^(-2) down to g = 22.5 over the entire COSMOS field. This work is the first step toward the eventual goal of setting up a grid of quasar absorption line probes of the 2 deg^2 field and of conducting a complete census of supermassive black holes in this well-studied survey region. The total quasar count at the conclusion of this study is 139, making COSMOS one of the most densely sampled regions of sky where a grid of quasar sight lines can be used to probe the intervening volume.
Additional Information
© 2006. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2005 December 19; accepted 2006 February 10. We are grateful to Cathy Petry and Xiaohui Fan for advice during the project and to Kris Eriksen, Andy Marble, and Daniel Eisenstein for observing assistance. M. P. was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. C. D. I. acknowledges support of this research through NASA award HST-GO-10092.04 to the University of Arizona. Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, and the Max Planck Society. The SDSS Web site is http://www.sdss.org. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC) for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are The University of Chicago, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, The Johns Hopkins University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, University of Pittsburgh, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 76243
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170408-164450550
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- HST-GO-10092.04
- NASA
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- NSF
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- Japanese Monbukagakusho
- Max Planck Society
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
-
2018-03-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)