THE PAN-STARRS1 DISTANT z > 5.6 QUASAR SURVEY: MORE THAN 100 QUASARS WITHIN THE FIRST GYR OF THE UNIVERSE

By E. Bañados, B. Venemans, R. Decarli, E. Farina, C. Mazzucchelli, F. Walter, Xiaohui Fan, Daniel Stern, Edward F. Schlafly, K. Chambers and 27 more. 2016

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Luminous quasars at can be studied in detail with the current generation of telescopes and provide us with unique information on the first gigayear of the universe. Thus far, these studies have been statistically limited by the number of quasars known at these redshifts. Such quasars are rare, and therefore, wide-field surveys are required to identify them, and multiwavelength data are required to separate them efficiently from their main contaminants, the far more numerous cool dwarfs. In this paper, we update and extend the selection for the quasars presented in Bañados et al. (2014) using the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) survey. We present the PS1 distant quasar sample, which currently consists of 124 quasars in the redshift range that satisfy our selection criteria. Of these quasars, 77 have been discovered with PS1, and 63 of them are newly identified in this paper. We present the composite spectra of the PS1 distant quasar sample. This sample spans a factor of ∼20 in luminosity and shows a variety of emission line properties. The number of quasars at presented in this work almost doubles the previously known quasars at these redshifts, marking a transition phase from studies of individual sources to statistical studies of the high-redshift quasar population, which was impossible with earlier, smaller samples.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e60e03577ab25710cb2b0a737a6e52126e1225d

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Citations in the corpus

A JWST/NIRSpec First Census of Broad-line AGNs at z = 4–7: Detection of 10 Faint AGNs with M BH ∼ 106–108 M ⊙ and Their Host Galaxy Properties (2023, background): “…the evolution of the SMBH growth in cosmic history, but previous observations have been limited to bright quasars identified in surveys with ground-based telescopes (e.g., Ba˜nados et al. 2016; Shen et al. 2019, see Inayoshi et al. 2020 for a review) including the most distant quasars at z > 7 .”
Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, methodology): “…the highest redshift quasar currently known at z = 7.1 was found by Mortlock et al. (2011) relying on the IR coverage of the UKIDSS survey, and Bañados et al. (2016) has recently used NIR and MIR observations from 2MASS, VHS and WISE to help in the identification of z > 5.6 quasars candidates…”
Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs). V. Quasar Luminosity Function and Contribution to Cosmic Reionization at z = 6 (2018, background): “The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) have been made possible through contributions of the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institut”
Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, background): “The studies discussed in this section provide upper limits on the abundance of DCBHs, with a consensus emerging that the number density of DCBHs is greater than the observed number density of quasars at z ∼ 10 cGpc−3 (e.g., Bañados et al. 2016).”
An ALMA [C ii] Survey of 27 Quasars at z > 5.94 (2018, background): “…in the literature at >z 5.5, 119 at >z 6.0, 15 at >z 6.5, and only two at >z 7.0 (see, e.g., Fan et al. 2006; Mortlock et al. 2011; Venemans et al. 2013; Bañados et al. 2016, 2018; Jiang et al. 2016; Matsuoka et al. 2016, 2017; Mazzucchelli et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2017, and references therein).”
Physical Properties of 15 Quasars at z ≳ 6.5 (2017, methodology): “Following Bañados et al. (2016), we extrapolate m1450 from the J-band magnitude, assuming a power law fit of the continuum (f ∼ λ−α), with α = −1.7 (Selsing et al. 2016)10.”
Great Optically Luminous Dropout Research Using Subaru HSC (GOLDRUSH). I. UV Luminosity Functions at $z \sim 4-7$ Derived with the Half-Million Dropouts on the 100 deg$^2$ Sky (2017, background): “…2015; Kriek et al. 20154; Wang et al. 2016; Toshikawa et al. 2016; Momcheva et al. 2016; Matsuoka et al. 2016; Pâris et al. 2017; Tasca et al. 2017; Yang et al. 2017; Masters et al. 2017; Matsuoka et al. 2017; Shibuya et al. 2017b; R. Higuchi et al. in preparation; see also Bañados et al. 2016).”
THE FINAL SDSS HIGH-REDSHIFT QUASAR SAMPLE OF 52 QUASARS AT z > 5.7 (2016, background): “The Pan-STARRS1 covers 3π steradians of the sky, and is now producing a large number of high-redshift quasars (Morganson et al. 2012; Bañados et al. 2014; Venemans et al. 2015; Bañados et al. 2016), including three quasars at < <z6.”