The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Sample Characterization

By Yue Shen, P. Hall, K. Horne, G. Zhu, I. McGreer, T. Simm, J. Trump, K. Kinemuchi, W. N. Brandt, P. Green and 17 more. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2018

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a detailed characterization of the 849 broad-line quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. Our quasar sample covers a redshift range of 0.1 < z < 4.5 and is flux-limited to iPSF < 21.7 without any other cuts on quasar properties. The main sample characterization includes: (1) spectral measurements of the continuum and broad emission lines for individual objects from the coadded first-season spectroscopy in 2014, (2) identification of broad and narrow absorption lines in the spectra, and (3) optical variability properties for continuum and broad lines from multi-epoch spectroscopy. We provide improved systemic redshift estimates for all quasars and demonstrate the effects of the signal-to-noise ratio on the spectral measurements. We compile measured properties for all 849 quasars along with supplemental multi-wavelength data for subsets of our sample from other surveys. The SDSS-RM sample probes a diverse range in quasar properties and shows well-detected continuum and broad-line variability for many objects from first-season monitoring data. The compiled properties serve as the benchmark for follow-up work based on SDSS-RM data. The spectral fitting tools are made public along with this work.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26d975a6625954700331e63d488e4103410e345f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Hans-Walter Rix
2. D. Schneider
3. P. Hopkins
4. L. Hernquist
5. Jo Bovy
6. Simon D. M. White
7. D. M. Alexander
8. C. Conroy

In Instrumentation

1. Hans-Walter Rix
2. C. Conroy
3. D. Schneider
4. Jo Bovy
5. C. Chiappini
6. P. Hopkins
7. M. Blanton
8. Simon D. M. White

Citations in the corpus

• The Eighteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Targeting and First Spectra from SDSS-V (2023, methodology): “Utilizing 849 SDSS-IV RM quasars (Shen et al. 2019) and the weighted empca package (Bailey 2012, 2016), a new set of QSO principal component analysis (PCA) templates are used for PCA reconstruction and the redshift estimation of SDSS-V quasars.”