The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Fourteenth Data Release? Isabelle Pâris1, Patrick Petitjean2, Éric Aubourg3, Adam D
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A&A 613, A51 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201732445 Astronomy & © ESO 2018 Astrophysics The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Fourteenth data release? Isabelle Pâris1, Patrick Petitjean2, Éric Aubourg3, Adam D. Myers4, Alina Streblyanska5,6, Brad W. Lyke4, Scott F. Anderson7, Éric Armengaud8, Julian Bautista9, Michael R. Blanton10, Michael Blomqvist1, Jonathan Brinkmann11, Joel R. Brownstein9, William Nielsen Brandt12,13,14, Étienne Burtin8, Kyle Dawson9, Sylvain de la Torre1, Antonis Georgakakis15, Héctor Gil-Marín16,17, Paul J. Green18, Patrick B. Hall19, Jean-Paul Kneib20, Stephanie M. LaMassa21, Jean-Marc Le Goff8, Chelsea MacLeod18, Vivek Mariappan9, Ian D. McGreer22, Andrea Merloni15, Pasquier Noterdaeme2, Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille8, Will J. Percival23, Ashley J. Ross24, Graziano Rossi25, Donald P. Schneider12,13, Hee-Jong Seo26, Rita Tojeiro27, Benjamin A. Weaver28, Anne-Marie Weijmans27, Christophe Yèche8, Pauline Zarrouk8, and Gong-Bo Zhao29,23 (Affiliations can be found after the references) Received 10 December 2017 / Accepted 14 January 2018 ABSTRACT We present the data release 14 Quasar catalog (DR14Q) from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV (SDSS-IV). This catalog includes all SDSS-IV/eBOSS objects that were spectroscopically targeted as quasar candidates and that are confirmed as quasars via a new automated procedure combined with a partial visual inspection of −1 −1 spectra, have luminosities Mi [z = 2] < −20:5 (in a ΛCDM cosmology with H0 = 70 km s Mpc , ΩM = 0:3, and ΩΛ = 0:7), and either display at least one emission line with a full width at half maximum larger than 500 km s−1 or, if not, have interesting/complex absorption features. The catalog also includes previously spectroscopically-confirmed quasars from SDSS-I, II, and III. The catalog contains 526 356 quasars (144 046 are new discoveries since the beginning of SDSS-IV) detected over 9376 deg2 (2044 deg2 having new spectroscopic data available) with robust identification and redshift measured by a combination of principal component eigenspectra. The catalog is estimated to have about 0.5% contamination. Redshifts are provided for the Mg II emission line. The catalog identifies 21 877 broad absorption line quasars and lists their characteristics. For each object, the catalog presents five-band (u, g, r, i, z) CCD- based photometry with typical accuracy of 0.03 mag. The catalog also contains X-ray, ultraviolet, near-infrared, and radio emission properties of the quasars, when available, from other large-area surveys. The calibrated digital spectra, covering the wavelength region 3610–10 140 Å at a spectral resolution in the range 1300 < R < 2500, can be retrieved from the SDSS Science Archiver Server. Key words. catalogs – surveys – quasars: general 1. Introduction (DR7) quasar catalog (Schneider et al. 2010). The main science driver was studies of the quasar population through the measure- Since the identification of the first quasar redshift by Schmidt ment of their luminosity function (e.g. Richards et al. 2006) (1963), each generation of spectroscopic surveys has enlarged and clustering properties (e.g. Hennawi et al. 2006; Shen et al. the number of known quasars by roughly an order of magnitude: 2007). The quasar program of SDSS-I/II also led to the discov- the Bright Quasar Survey (Schmidt & Green 1983) reached the ery of a significant sample of z > 5 quasars (e.g. Fan et al. 2006; 100 discoveries milestone, followed by the Large Bright Quasar Jiang et al. 2008), large samples of broad absorption line (BAL) Survey (LBQS; Hewett et al. 1995) and its 1000 objects, then the quasars (e.g. Reichard et al. 2003; Trump et al. 2006; Gibson ∼25 000 quasars from the 2dF Quasar Redshift Survey (2QZ; et al. 2008), type 2 candidates (Reyes et al. 2008) or samples Croom et al. 2004), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; of objects with peculiar properties such as weak emission lines York et al. 2000) with over 100 000 new quasars (Schneider et al. (Diamond-Stanic et al. 2009). Quasar target selection algorithms 2010). Many other surveys have also significantly contributed for SDSS-I/II are fully detailed in Richards et al.(2002) and to increase the number of known quasars (e.g. Osmer & Smith Schneider et al.(2010). 1980; Boyle et al. 1988; Storrie-Lombardi et al. 1996). The main motivation to observe quasars with SDSS- Each iteration of SDSS has pursued different science goals, III/BOSS (Eisenstein et al. 2011; Dawson et al. 2013) was to and hence set different requirements for their associated quasar constrain the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) scale at z ∼ 2:5 target selection. using the H I located in the intergalactic medium (IGM) as a 5 SDSS-I/II (York et al. 2000) aimed to observe ∼10 quasars; tracer of large scale structures. About 270 000 quasars, mostly The final quasar list was presented in the SDSS data release 7 in the redshift range 2.15–3.5 for which at least part of the Lyman-α forest lies in the spectral range, have been discovered ? http://www.sdss.org/dr14/algorithms/qso_catalog by SDSS-III/BOSS. The measurement of the auto-correlation A51, page 1 of 17 Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. A&A 613, A51 (2018) function of the Lyman-α forest (e.g. Bautista et al. 2017) and We summarize the target selection and observations in the cross-correlation of quasars and the Lyman-α forest (e.g. Sect.2. We describe the visual inspection process and describe du Mas des Bourboux et al. 2017) have provided unprecedented the definition of the DR14Q parent sample in Sect.3. We discuss cosmological constraints at z ∼ 2:5. This sample was also used the accuracy of redshift estimates in Sect.4 and present our auto- to study the luminosity function of quasars (Ross et al. 2013; mated detection of BAL quasars in Sect.5. General properties of Palanque-Delabrouille et al. 2013), moderate-scale clustering of the DR14Q sample are reviewed in Sects.6 and7, and the for- z ∼ 2:5 quasars (e.g. Eftekharzadeh et al. 2015). Repeat spec- mat of the catalog is described in Sect.8. Finally, we conclude troscopic observations of BAL quasars have been performed to in Sect.9. constrain the scale and dynamics of quasar outflows (Filiz Ak In the following, we use a ΛCDM cosmology with H0 −1 −1 et al. 2012, 2013, 2014). Peculiar population of quasars have = 70 km s Mpc , ΩM = 0:3, ΩΛ = 0:7 (Spergel et al. been also identified in this enormous sample such as z > 2 2003). We define a quasar as an object with a luminosity type 2 quasar candidates (Alexandroff et al. 2013) or extremely Mi[z = 2] < −20:5 and either displaying at least one emission red quasars (Ross et al. 2015; Hamann et al. 2017). In order line with a full-width at half maximum (FWHM) > 500 km s−1 to maximize the number of z > 2 quasars, the target selection or, if not, having interesting/complex absorption features. for SDSS-III/BOSS used a variety of target selection algorithms Indeed, a few tens of objects have weak emission lines but the (Bovy et al. 2011, 2012; Kirkpatrick et al. 2011; Yèche et al. Lyman-α forest is clearly visible in their spectra (Diamond- 2010; Palanque-Delabrouille et al. 2011; Richards et al. 2004). Stanic et al. 2009), and thus they are included in the DR14Q The overall quasar target selection strategy is described in Ross catalog. About 200 quasars with unusual BALs are also included et al.(2012). in our catalog (Hall et al. 2002) even though they do not Quasar observation in SDSS-IV is driven by multiple scien- formally meet the requirement on emission-line width. All mag- tific goals such as cosmology, understanding the physical nature nitudes quoted here are point spread function (PSF) magnitudes of X-ray sources and variable sources. (Stoughton et al. 2002) and are corrected for Galactic extinction SDSS-IV/eBOSS aims to constrain the angular-diameter dis- (Schlafly & Finkbeiner 2011). tance dA (z) and the Hubble parameter H (z) in the redshift range 0.6–3.5 using four different tracers of the underlying density field over 7500 deg2: 250 000 new luminous red galaxies (LRG) 2. Survey outline at 0:6 < z < 1:0, 195 000 new emission line galaxies (ELG) at 0:7 < z < 1:1, 450 000 new quasars at 0:9 < z < 2:2, and the In this section, we focus on imaging data used to perform the Lyman-α forest of 60 000 new z > 2:2 quasars. target selection of SDSS-IV quasar programs and new spectro- SDSS-IV/SPIDERS (SPectroscopic IDentification of scopic data obtained since August 2014. ERosita Sources) investigates the nature of X-ray emitting sources, including active galactic nuclei (Dwelly et al. 2017) 2.1. Imaging data and galaxy clusters (Clerc et al. 2016). Initially, SPIDERS targets X-ray sources detected mainly in the ROSAT All Sky Three sources of imaging data have been used to target quasars in Survey (Voges et al. 1999, 2000) which has recently been SDSS-IV/eBOSS (full details can be found in Myers et al. 2015): reprocessed (Boller et al. 2016). In late 2018, SPIDERS plans to updated calibrations of SDSS imaging, the Wide-Field Infrared begin targeting sources from the eROSITA instrument on board Survey (WISE; Wright et al. 2010), and the Palomar Transient the Spectrum Roentgen Gamma satellite (Predehl et al.